[Pomme]

Sulphur denitors? and calcium reactor media?

i have read recently in one of the fish magazines that it is good to run a sulphur denitor on your marine tanks to reduce the nitrates, down to nsw at 0.014mg/l? (or something like that), as having one of these bits of kit would help to acheive this goal?

but then the water coming out of the ractor would have a low ph? so it is good to run it then through calcium reactor medium which will add calcium at about 500g/l and also strontium and..... something else.

so if i did this would this work? as surely it would be like having a calcium reactor with the added benefit of reducing the nitrates?

whats sort of flow rate would you want to run theough these, is it small like a perialistic or a ocean runer pump?

all advice appreciated

thanx
andrew

[Ninong]

Andrew,

Denitrators of one sort or another seem to be bigger in Europe (especially Germany) than they are over here in the States. These sulfur denitrators are the latest twist in this theme. I have no experience with any of them but I have read several posts by people who have used denitrators in the past and from what I have read they seem to be finicky and tricky to maintain properly. I have even heard of people feeding them sugar water and vodka to get them to work better.

I prefer to rely on my sand bed, live rock and protein skimmer to handle my nitrates. My tank has been running around 1 ppm nitrate for the past several weeks now even though I feed extremely heavily. I have seen German reeftanks on German hobbyists' websites that are beautiful tanks but they are running nitrates of 10 ppm or higher in spite of all sorts of mechanical gizmos and gadgets, including the typical German-made denitrators such as the one Aqua-Medic puts out. I would rather just have to feed my tank and not have to worry about feeding my denitrator.

[Pomme]

yeah i have decided that now, thanx for the advice,
andrew