Do I have enough filtration

[tiger15]

Ok, I can see a low stock, heavily planted tank working. I was just curious because it sounded similar to how I kept my reef tanks. I basically had 1.5lbs of live rock per gallon, good flow, lots of macro algae like dragons breath, “dirty” water corals like zoas , mushrooms , Xenia etc. and a good CUC. Never needed skimmers n sumps doing this type of setup. I’ve always heard that the majority of BB in freshwater is in the filter media and that the glass, gravel plants don’t provide enough surface area for it to work in freshwater setups. Sounds like it’s working for you. I won’t try it with my large bio load in my current tanks, but I might try it down the line with a different tank.

In reef tanks, you do deep sand and live rock to carry nitrification in shallow zone, and denitrification in deep zone all the way to nitrogen. In freshwater, you do shallow sand for nitrification only, and rely on WC for denitrification (nitrate reduction). Doing freshwater WC is so much easier and cheaper than for saltwater so there is no point to go further. Another difference in freshwater is that fish stocking can be 10+ times higher than for saltwater as BB are 10+ times more efficient in freshwater, provided that you keep up with regular WC to reduce nitrate.

No, BB in freshwater live everywhere in the fish tank as in saltwater. Vendors make you believe that their bio media is the best and BB choose to live there only.

 

[neutrino]

Ok, I can see a low stock, heavily planted tank working. I was just curious because it sounded similar to how I kept my reef tanks. I basically had 1.5lbs of live rock per gallon, good flow, lots of macro algae like dragons breath, “dirty” water corals like zoas , mushrooms , Xenia etc. and a good CUC. Never needed skimmers n sumps doing this type of setup. I’ve always heard that the majority of BB in freshwater is in the filter media and that the glass, gravel plants don’t provide enough surface area for it to work in freshwater setups. Sounds like it’s working for you. I won’t try it with my large bio load in my current tanks, but I might try it down the line with a different tank.

I think the difference from your reef tanks would be that you had an ecologically balanced setup including beneficial bacteria-- live rock, and what amounted to a living filtration system with the algae and corals in balance with whatever fish you had. I've seen what I'd consider an analog to it in freshwater tanks by some combination of plants, substrate, algae, or drip systems and/or other elements in varying ways, but most of us simply rely on some type of power driven filter or another.

I've played with filtration and various media over the years, including UV units and fluidized bed filters, but that's about as far as I've gone, personally. There are other systems I find intriguing that I haven't done myself. Personally, what I do is try to create a balance of fish and feeding lightly to moderately vs. substrate, algae or plants, and filtration levels. I don't follow the 'you can never have too much filtration' approach. Nothing wrong with it, but it's not what I do.

In my tanks, filtration capacity beyond a certain level is more about water clarifying than anything else, sufficient beneficial bacteria is a non-issue. By some people's reckoning some of my tanks have been way underfiltered, and by some people's reckoning I don't change water often enough, yet I have low nitrates, zero everything else, and my fish are healthy and typically long lived. I'm not a master mind on the subject, I try to keep it simple, but I've been successful for a long time. It's not the magic formula, there's more than one way to do it.