Someone should close this thread... Scatman, stop replying to this please, the vast majority of reef keepers are indoctrinated buy the companies that sell them products, and even more so by the older generations using out dated and sometimes outright wrong processes, they will take a long time to change, and will require people of much greater fame to convince them otherwise.
If you want to get information on contraversial topics you have to reasearch it yourself as I found out long ago, because on forums, people will always attack you for trying something "new". I also recomend trying to find articels by people with actual degrees and science behind what they claim otherwise its just smoke and mirrors like everything else they are trying to "sell" you. For example, I've found articles saying that Iodine is nessisary for invert molting, this is not the case, if you look up scholarly articels with reference to invert molting, you will find NO mention of Iodine in upwards of 20000 articles, it infact is toxic, and frequent molting by inverts exposed to it, is the result of attempting to remove poisons from their bodys. Another example, "Strontium is nessisary for coral growth" another phalacy, infact strontium has been shown to slow growth, the reason it is claimed nessisary? Because there is strontium presant in the coral skeletons... but wait... we have super small traces of urainium in our skeletons... that must mean we need uranium in our diets right? WRONG, it ends up in our bones because thats all our bodies can figure out what to do with the toxin, they hide it away in the skeleton. Or here is the biggest myth you will ever hear, that Live rock is THE best place for benifital bacteria. WRONG, the sand bed is, no matter how porus the stone is, a sand bed will have infinitly more surface area for BB, as 1 cubic foot of sand can have as much or more surface aread as a football field... WOW thats a lot of space for bacteria... put it even more simply... how are BB supposed to survive when your rock is completley covered with coraline algea? A hard algea... that would block most if not all water flow through... that would cut down quite a bit on the BB able to grow in the rocks wouldn't it?
Suffice to say, I have spent countless hours sifting though hundreds and thousands of web pages to filter out the good information from the "standard" information... sometimes yes, the "standard practice" is the best option, but more often then not I haven't found this to be the case, there is almost always a better, yes sometimes harder, but better way to do things.
