ok thanks, I normally just rinse the floss in the bucket to remove all the waste and stuff and put it back in, should I stop doing that?
Hello; From my point of view the short answer is stop doing that. The filter serves two functions with perhaps the main one being mechanical trapping of detritus. Floss is fairly good for that and is fairly cheap. Once it is loaded with detritus (junk) it is time to throw it away and replace it with new floss.
I get from reading threads and posts on this forum the last 8 or 9 years that many think old dirty floss should be "gently" sloshed in old tank water and reused. I guess the thinking is this preserves the beneficial bacteria (bb). This approach does not make sense for the floss but does make sense for the more dedicated bio-media that should be behind the floss. The floss is in front to catch the junk and try to keep it off of the bio-media.
Can there be some bb in the floss? Sure as the bb can and likely do reside on most surfaces. I do not know how to judge what percentage might be in the floss compared to other places in the tank. I do not think the floss holds the greater percentage of bb. I think the bb will be in colonies on most other surfaces of the tank and those surfaces where there is some water flow passing by may hold somewhat more colonies.
I use to have a large power filter on a 225 tank. It had around a gallon of capacity. I use to have a deep layer of glass marbles covered by floss. I changed out the floss fairly often and just tossed it away. The marbles took a while to get clogged up and I would rinse them off from time to time and put them back.
Bear in mind the bb will be inside the tubes of the filter system. Also be on décor, substrate and other solid surfaces in a tank. Perhaps a bit more where regular water flow passes by as the bb "feed" on the ammonia and nitrite and need these nutrients to pass over them. That said I have run tanks with only air bubble sponge filters and many years ago with no filtration at all. Even a lone heater in a bare tank will create a convection current in the water.
To preserve bb my plan is to clean only one part of a filter system at a time. I may replace floss only one day and then days or weeks later give the bio-media a rinse and then days or weeks later clean out the filter tubes and body when that get clogged up. I have a filter with two chamber on my largest running tank right now. I do one chamber at a time when replacing the floss or cleaning the bio-media.
I also keep some of the sponge bases off of sponge filters in the back of my filters. This does two things. I have the sponge ready and loaded with some bb so I can set up a new tank right away. The other is while I do regular maintainence on the filters I have some bb loaded surface to take up the slack if I do happen to remove a bit more bb than planned.
Also bear in mind once the tank is established with bb colonies that the loss of a percentage of the bb from one place will be fairly quickly replaced by the remaining bb colonies. Just do not mess with all of the bb at the same time.
