Did I mess up?

[markrovner]

Just set up a 40g reef tank, with lotsof live rock, 4 inches of aragonite, a sump, and a skimmer. All is proceeding nicely chemistry-wise, but now i am reading from some sources that I hsould have created some sort of plenum or space underneath the sandbed. I didn't.

No critters yet -- did i mess up?

Thanks in advance! :help:

 

[mogurnda]

Some still use them, but most of the recommendations for the use of a plenum are out of date. It turns out there's very little evidence that a plenum will do anything for your denitrification.

There's a nice little article here, comparing the ability of DSBs and plena to deal with nutrients.

The upshot is:
"Our experiment shows no evidence for any of the espoused benefits of a plenum (reviewed by Goemans 1999). Instead our results suggest that any benefits seen are a direct consequence of the presence of the sediments themselves rather than the void space beneath it.
We show that even among identical tanks set up in a laboratory without any live animals, there can be dramatic differences in performance from one aquarium to the next (see Figures 2 & 3 above). Our results highlight the problem with any study lacking proper replication, and in which there are no controls. We argue that anecdotal evidence is simply presentation of an opinion in cases such as this, and more than 5 years of heated debate has resulted from the staunch defense of these opinions.
We urge hobbyists to develop a good 'BS' detector that will allow you to question information presented to you without any experimental evidence to support it. "