DIY Biotope w/ tons of plants & a living wall and potential for disaster!

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Pinkey

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Nov 16, 2004
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How does the deep sand bed help the plants? I remember reading both that anaerobic conditions encourage bacteria that eat nitrates and that anaerobic conditions release toxic something (don't remember) into the water. It would certainly be easy to add more sand. The next planned upgrade is real aquarium lights to grow aquatic plants which will help increase the ration of plant mass to fish waste. I'd certainly appreciate any links or suggestions.

Thank you.
 

stingray4540

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Oct 18, 2005
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Deep sand beds are a well established practice in the salt water hobby.

Basically you have bacteria to eat ammonia, and nitrites, but the bacteria that eats nitrates can only grow in dark nearly anaerobic conditions. I'm paraphrasing from my past research.
A deep sand bed allows for these conditions to exist.
Generally you need 4-6 inch deep sand. You can do this by having a deep substrate, or you can put it in your sump.

I had a DSB set up in the sump of my dads 150 gallon that was stocked with a GT, an Oscar, a Dempsey, a blue crayfish and a dozen or so giant Danios.
He didn't do a water change for a year and a half. All he did was top off evaporation, and his readings never got out of control.

Since you already have a sand substrate, it would be as simple as adding more sand.

There is disagreement on the necessity of it, but some say you should have something to slowly turn throw the substrate to prevent toxic gas pockets.
Personally I just put some trumpet snails in my African tank. The fish will eat them so they hide during the day and come out at night and keep the tank alge free
 

stingray4540

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Sorry, I typed that last bit while I was working, from my cell phone, and now I can't go back and edit the spelling, etc. or add any links.

Anyways, you are probably best to just google "freshwater deep sand bed" or "freshwater DSB", there are a ton of discussions and a few articles to be found.

Here is a good two part article:
http://www.saltcorner.com/Articles/Showarticle.php?articleID=22
http://www.saltcorner.com/Articles/Showarticle.php?articleID=22

Another thing you might look into is a DIY denitrator, but I have no experience with those.

I should offer a disclamer in that my only experience with DSB was with my dad's tank and the DSB was in the sump. That tank also sprang a leak after a year and a half, so if there were any future problems that would have shown up in say 5 years, I wouldn't know about it. But it did go well for the 1.5 years it was running.
I recently resealed that very same tank and will be setting it up at my house. I will be trying a DSB in the substrate so we will see how that goes.
 

Pinkey

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Thanks for the article links. The DSB may explain why a smaller tank I have has no nitrates. It is funny. Just last week I harvested some trumpet snails from the other tank and put them in the one in the photo. We'll see if they can reproduce quickly enough to survive 3 bored oscars.

I will certainly implement the plenum method described in the article. I like your idea of putting it in the sump. I'll use small gravel rather than sand, though. The article said gravel is a lot better. The primary sump is full of bio media which may be redundant. I could always add a secondary. More sump volume is probably always a good thing as long as both sumps are connected and fed through the same plumbing system it should make sure there is never a flood.

Do you know how much bio media is too much? I know the total mass of the bacteria is limited to the amount of fish waste produced in the system but I have no idea how much living space that much bacteria would take. I'll search the forums tonight and see if it has been addressed in any way I can find.
 

atreis

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My understanding is that nitrate eating bacteria are only able to live in saltwater environments.

There's no such things as "too much" biomedia - you would just have some surface area that's not colonized. That would be inefficient (in the economic sense), but otherwise harmless.
 

Pinkey

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It is the economy of my aquarium stand space that I would like to maximize. I would like as much biomedia as could be needed and use the rest of the space for other things.
 

stingray4540

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Oct 18, 2005
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Thanks for the article links. The DSB may explain why a smaller tank I have has no nitrates. It is funny. Just last week I harvested some trumpet snails from the other tank and put them in the one in the photo. We'll see if they can reproduce quickly enough to survive 3 bored oscars.

I will certainly implement the plenum method described in the article. I like your idea of putting it in the sump. I'll use small gravel rather than sand, though. The article said gravel is a lot better. The primary sump is full of bio media which may be redundant. I could always add a secondary. More sump volume is probably always a good thing as long as both sumps are connected and fed through the same plumbing system it should make sure there is never a flood.

Do you know how much bio media is too much? I know the total mass of the bacteria is limited to the amount of fish waste produced in the system but I have no idea how much living space that much bacteria would take. I'll search the forums tonight and see if it has been addressed in any way I can find.
No such thing as too much bio media. Bacteria will colonize according to available food.
Bio balls will not be redundant, they are too big. The nitrate bacteria need near oxygenless environment with low waterflow. The larger your media(gravel) the deeper your bed will need to be. The smaller the grain size, the easier it create the right conditions, but too small and it won't work. I think that article covered that topic.
At any rate, whatever route you take, please share your results in a few months after you bacteria cycles.
 

stingray4540

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Oct 18, 2005
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My understanding is that nitrate eating bacteria are only able to live in saltwater environments.

There's no such things as "too much" biomedia - you would just have some surface area that's not colonized. That would be inefficient (in the economic sense), but otherwise harmless.
I have never heard that nitrate bacteria could not live in freshwater, and I have seen multiple cases of people implementing DSB in freshwater.

They do however, need low oxygen levels, hence the DSB, plenum, and denitrafyers.
 

Pinkey

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Update:

After looking extensively into deep sand bed filters and then fluidized sand filters I introduced a rout of snails which quickly multiplied and have been churning the sand ever since. While this experiment has not gone on long enough to draw solid conclusions, 25% water changes have resulted in predictable nitrate reductions. Nitrates are going down just through water changes and maybe from new bacterial colonies. The tank is well in the safe zone (numbers aren't good enough for me to post and brag about them yet).
 

FishFanMan

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If you want to seed it with new denitrifying bacterial colony, might look into a product called AquaBella. I've yet to see my nitrates go above 10ppm. Here's what their website say.

"AquaBella Bio-Enzyme’s unique cleansing ability stems from a complete set of naturally occurring essential enzymes, aerobic, anaerobic and facultative bacteria with a wide range of desirable metabolic activities for treatment of salt and freshwater aquariums. These nitrifying and denitrifying bacteria prevent the accumulation of harmful nitrogen forms by metabolizing organic waste and converting ammonia, nitrite and nitrate into their final form, inert nitrogen gas."

No, I don't work for them! But it seems to work very well for me.
 
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