Bio-balls

[dirtee147]

I have read in my salt water book that every six months you should clean your bio-balls butt other pepple say that you should'nt mess with them.Should I clean themor not?

 

[birdy]

IMO you should clean 1/3rd of the balls every couple of weeks, if you clean all of them at once you will disrupt the biological filtration of your tank, and be sure you wash them in SALTWATER, or you will kill all the bacteria on the balls, if you can siphon out the junk in the bottom of your Wet/dry, try to do that once a month also.

 

[dirtee147]

if i just clean the gunk at the bottom will that help or should I swich back and forth between the tow

 

[mudplayerx]

If you have 3 or more inches of live sand and 1.5 to 2 pounds of live rock, then you don't even need to bioballs.

 

[theirr]

Can you give me step by step how to clean the bio balls? Best to seperate the balls in three nets so that you can just remove one set at a time and be sure to clean them all in the right order or just grab a bunch and clean em?
And how do you clean them? just rinse them off in saltwater or is there some scrubbing involved etc...

 

[dirtee147]

can you get away with not cleaning the bio-balls and just clean out the gunk from unerneath?

 

[dirtee147]

Is LR better than bio-balls and if it is do i just put it in or crush it first or what?

 

[birdy]

Is this for a FOWLR tank or a Reef tank?
I would say putting LR in the sump is better than bioballs, just more expensive.

 

[dirtee147]

it's a 55 gal reef. I have about 20 lbs of exta dr that i could use but do i crush it or leave in large chuncks?

 

[birdy]

I would leave it in big pieces. You want the aneorobic areas of the rock (deep inside) those are where nitrates are broken down.

 

[theirr]

Can you give me step by step how to clean the bio balls? Best to seperate the balls in three nets so that you can just remove one set at a time and be sure to clean them all in the right order or just grab a bunch and clean em?
And how do you clean them? just rinse them off in saltwater or is there some scrubbing involved etc...

 

[theirr]

bump

 

[mr_bill]

No on the scrubbing. What I did was scoop some out into old spegetti strainer and then use some water I siphoned out of my tank during a water change that was in 5gal bucket to pour water over them. Your just trying to get the heavy junk off.

 

[theirr]

but in a wet dry filter the water pours over the balls anyway. the junk lays in the bottom of the sump. My balls look clean! (hehe) so I just clean out the bottom of the sump every now and again. If I take some of the balls out and dip them in water I should get cloudy water if they are dirty - if not the I wouldn't see anything much in the water after the rinse - right..........

 

[birdy]

Right, you are mainly worried about the chunky stuff, especially on the bottom, sometimes the balls get it caught up in them also, just a rinse with saltwater is fine.