Hey Arch,
I am still new to this too, and I read all of those posts that you have read. I decided to leave the bio balls in their place, after talking to my LFS its of the opinoin that is just up to prefrence. Being so new to SW if I was going to make changes I wanted to do one at a time. That way there if anything went wrong I wasnt scratching my head looking at all my different modifications wondering which one if any at all was to blame. Just My 2 cents. But again I am NEW. I did however scratch the filter assembly that they gave me. I used the filter floss and placed it above the balls in the back of the tank and put a large carbon bag under that. The water flows better and I am not constantly needing to monitor the level of water in the pump chamber due to a clogged filter. One other thing I needed to do regularly, was rinse the sponge off that the filtered water passes through to the pump chamber. After the new tank set up all the setament that got filtered through started to build up on that sponge and then started to wick through it. So one day I was seeing alot of debris flowing around in my tank I thought my large hermit was excavating but I saw the sponge and it had tons of build up on it. Now its fine and I rinse it every water change. I also bought an extra power head but I am not sure if you need one in a 12g or not. Good luck, one newb to another.
