Best biological media?

[Toby_H]

I've kept a lot of set ups over a lot of years. I've always thought "bio media" was hype. I've always been pretty cheap and minimize expenses where I can, including bypassing "bio media"...

And I've never had a tank that lacked the surface area to house sufficient bacteria to convert Ammonia to nitrite to nitrate.

I have a 150 Stock tank filtered by a single powerhead with no media, although it also has a ton of plants.

I once did a fishless cycle in a bare 10 gal with only a airstone as "filtration" (no media). I was able to put an astonishing amount of ammonia in it that was converted to nitrate. This was done just to prove that even a small amount of surface area was enough no host enough bacteria to handle significantly more ammonia than our tanks generate. There is a thread on it here somewhere (about 15 years ago).

I'm not going to argue with anyone who wants to utilize dedicated bio media. But for anyone considering not using it, with great confidence and considerable experience backing it, I'd encourage you to build filtration without it.

 

[jjohnwm]

I've kept a lot of set ups over a lot of years. I've always thought "bio media" was hype. I've always been pretty cheap and minimize expenses where I can, including bypassing "bio media"...

And I've never had a tank that lacked the surface area to house sufficient bacteria to convert Ammonia to nitrite to nitrate.

I have a 150 Stock tank filtered by a single powerhead with no media, although it also has a ton of plants.

I once did a fishless cycle in a bare 10 gal with only a airstone as "filtration" (no media). I was able to put an astonishing amount of ammonia in it that was converted to nitrate. This was done just to prove that even a small amount of surface area was enough no host enough bacteria to handle significantly more ammonia than our tanks generate. There is a thread on it here somewhere (about 15 years ago).

I'm not going to argue with anyone who wants to utilize dedicated bio media. But for anyone considering not using it, with great confidence and considerable experience backing it, I'd encourage you to build filtration without it.

So true. I suspect that just about any tank, especially a tank with substrate but even bare-bottom as well, has more than enough area for the required bacterial colony. Yet we constantly read and hear people talking about adding "more biomedia" to their set-ups, thinking somehow that more media will mean more bacteria and better filtration. Once you have enough...you have enough, more biomedia won't increase the bacterial population, it just gives them more space to spread out more thinly. There will never be more bacteria than the bioload can feed...or less, except perhaps in a newly-set-up tank.

And that brings up my main reason for liking to have biomedia. An easily portable media like sponge filters, or bagged loose media, makes it easy to grab a chunk of your established bacterial colony and plop it into a brand new tank, giving a healthy infusion of the bacteria you want. Their generation time is so short that it only takes a couple days for the new tank to be chugging along at full power.

Stop and think for a second; tanks with giant sumps packed with expensive dedicated biomedia work well and maintain good water quality...but so do tanks that have only a canister filter, with far less biomedia than the sump...or even tanks filtered with a HOB filter, which has even less space for media. Again...enough is enough, and too much is a waste of money. The only people deriving any benefit vastly over-sized beds of expensive boutique biomedia...are the folks who manufacture and sell the stuff.