Anyone here have experience with plenums? I would like to hear about any first hand experiences with them. I am planning a tank and would like to look into everything before it is setup and I can't change anything.
Plenums
- Thread starter reptileguy2727
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Reptile guy, I have experience with deep sand beds, which is basically a plenum system without the water space under the substrate and runs of the same basic concept with ammonia - nitrogen gas going on. Nitrate stays at or near zero when all the bacterias are established, even with normal fish loads and a penguin bio wheel full of detrius (really need to take that thing off someday...).
How long did you let it run? Your looking at at least two months before all the nitrifying and de-nitryfying bacterias establish themselves, also, if you have an overstocked and/or overfed tank, don't expect a plenum to take care of that problem...kissman said:
I had a plenum setup for about 2 yrs in a 100 gallon tank and seemed to always have brown , green and just plain ugliness below the substrate line and have also noticed this at the lfs that has a plenum setup. I constantly tried to keep it clean. I also had problems with brown slime and sometimes cyno acting up. I had good water movement. I had thought about adding a siphon outlet hose so I could from time to time siphon out some of the settled water and other debris because I had heard that a plenum could be a nitrate bomb. unfortunatly I never added this to my tank mostly because I did not really know a way to do this to my already set up tank (if I had known about this possible bomb at the time I set the tank up I could have added it with no problem) and did not want to release any gases that would cause problems and death to the tank population. when I came home from vacation I had a real problem in my tank with slime dead fish and corals. I had planned on changing out my 100 gallon tank with a built in bio ball filter system to a new 150 gallon tank with a fluval fx5 filter, a coral life ro unit, 50 gallon refugium which I had used with my 100 gallon. I was reading on this forum when I came across an article about crushed coral by MAX. after reading this I decided on a dsb. I had used crushed coral in my plenum setup and it was mostly course and not fine crushed coral I am not sure if this would have made any difference MAX and others here would be able to aanswer this better. What I do know is that using the dsb which I have had setup now for about (and only 3 months) is that the color on my rocks and at the substrate line is much more pleasing to the eye. I do still get a little brown diatom on the sand top and the tank panes but it easily wiped off and I wave my hand above the sand and the brown is gone. Before I would have to use a spoon to lift out the brown filled c.c. I have read here not to disturb the sand and let the critters do that, so I do have a question about the proper way to clean the sand top. should I lightly siphon it off or do as I have and gently wave my hand above the sand.