Benefits of Biopellets??

I have never tried bio pellets but have been dosing Vodka for 4yrs now.
Basically same chemistry as pellets jst makes more sence for me to pour in a half capful every night when I feed.
I stopped using GFO completely around 3 1/2 yrs ago.I don't battle algae or diatoms Nemore.
I'm very minimalist wen it comes to my tank. I hated spending $$ on GFO.
$12 bottle of good old hawkeye vodka

 

I'm gonna tell ya that it's not an over night fix.It takes time but well worth it in my opinion.
Please read up on dosing & take it very slow slow slow.

This is a must read if u r committed to doing vodka.
http://www.reefkeeping.com/issues/2008-08/nftt/index.php
Good luck

 

So GFo causes algae issues FD? I've been having some issues with cyano, diatoms, and algae. I posted last week and last night I ran chemiclean. Seems like it's working. What's the advantage of vodka dosing?

 

Nope
that's completely wrong!
Please read this article on dosing
http://www.reefkeeping.com/issues/2008-08/nftt/index.php
It will sum up vodka dosing.
Basically I was sick of buying GFO & wanted a way to control phosphates & nitrates and use the natural bacteria in our tanks to do it.
U really can run a successful reef tank without a refugium/algae scrubber/GFO & all the other stuff they try to sell.
I run charcoal to keep down the fishy smell & a very large skimmer "for my tank it's large" and that's it.

 

I saw FD reefer tank just a couple days ago. His corals looks great and showed me his very simplistic approach to filtration. Everything appears to be thriving for him and great coloration!

 

+1 on F.D. Reefers tank

 

Been using biopellets a good month or two.. To keep it in perspective, I have an empty tank (no LR or anything), a juvi porc puffer, 2 black n white oc's, about 50 really small hermits, dragons breath macro, and a few corals (sps and softies on frag rack atm), a SRO LX2000s, then a two little fishes 150 reactor I modded to be recirculating (I think the recirculating is an absolute must) in a 75g.

The first thing I noticed right away was any hair algae stopped popping up, and it started to diminish. The glass became a 2 week cleaning routine instead of every other day. The water clarity reminds me of the Right now bacteria system I ran few years back, it's crazy clean. And keeping nitrates down along with phosphates makes me laugh it's so much of a moot point now... But because of the puffer and his onslaught of the hermits (I keep them for him to hunt) phosphates have hung around .13, so I added some phoslock few days ago, down to about .05-.08 atm.

Since I jacked around with the reactor it caused a disturbance with parameters, I'll have a spike for a day usually then it'll level back out..

Everything seems happy, still doing weekly wc's for good measure..

Though I'm curious as to the difference of traditional carbon dosing vs pellets in a recirculating reactor. I know people say it's the same, but I always think of application and how different it is. Vs putting a carbon source in the tank and vice versa containing it in the reactor...
I can't see it being the same though end results are... It's like reading a floppy disk, you can indeed use a micron electroscope, or you can also use a floppy drive, the end result is the same but how you go about it is very different...

Only time will tell, but so far with the results I'm seeing I am impressed.(especially since I have an empty tank with no LR or other filters for bio filtration) I'll probably keep using the phoslock though since I've seen many people have had to, since I don't want 0 nitrates especially.