Starting the bio-farm for 6 summer tanks

[TwoTankAmin]

First, Ia quick correction, the tank I am using is a 40B not a 50. typo- sorry.

Things are not going as expected. Ammonia has dropped in half and stayed there. My best guess is the Bottle of Dr. tim's was mishandled before I received it. I had it in the fridge and then gave it a few hours to come back to room temp. before adding it. it should have cleared the ammonia in 24 -36 hours. The drop by half I have seen is pretty much due to the seeding I did from filters in other tanks.

This is the one drawback to working with living bacteria in a bottle. It will die if frozen or as the temperature goes over about 105F fpr any length of time. By about 120F it is pretty much dead. At some point between where it was bottles and when I received it, it was likely killed. I have had this happen before. More often the bacteria arrived alive.

As a precaution I added some (1/2 teaspoon) baking soda (sodium bicarbonate - NaHCO₃ ). This should raise the pH some. I am about to start the weekend of tank maint. I will add more filter squeezings. I will also kick the ammonia concentration up to about 4-4.5 ppm.

Here are the promised pics.

This is a decent view of the terrace:



Here iare the tanks. The 50 it top left. It has the 10 ppi Poret divider but I cut it a ta wide and need to remove about 1/2 inch. The other 2 top tanks are 40Bs. The one on the right end is the bio-farm. The under tanks are all 20Ls with a 20 ppi Poret divider. The bottom right tank needs a background added and I will also block the left sides of some tanks as the afternoonevening sun comes from that direction. All the stands are raised so that I can sit on a stool to work on the bottom tanks and because that makes it easier to siphon the bottom. I may or may not use sand subsytrate in any of the tanks.



Here is the bio-farm tank. The bag holds crushed coral and the white ghost on the left is the reflection of a light on a table not visible in the pics.



Here are the cycling toys. The jug holds RO/DI. The guy from Cobalt in the vendor room slapped the sticker on the jug when I was setting up.



And this has nothing to do with the above. I coated a lava rock with Repashy Soilent Green and dropped it into the 75. I was hopingthe amanos would feed. they were about the only thing in the tanks that did not.

 

[TwoTankAmin]

Everything stalled at about 1.5 pp, of ammonia. it makes no sense. If the initial addition dropped in half, then the process should have continued. Instead i keep getting 1.5 ppm readings for the last few days.

I have another bottle of Dr. Tim's coming. But the seeding from the cycled filters should have starting things moving, yet they are stalled. I even checked the pH today and it is about 7.5 -7.6. The baking soda worked to raise the pH by about .5 or so. I added more filter squeezings yesterday, and they seemed to do very little.

I even checked the Ammonia test kit by testing a sample of my RO/DI water. The result was as yellow as a lemon.

If the test tomorrow is still at 1.5 ppm, I plan to do a big water change and reset things. I have done this process 7 or 8 times over the years and it has always gone smoothly. But then I did not jinx myself by making a thread about it. *sigh* I think before I change any water I will test for nitrite out of curiosity.

I squeezed out several poret foam cubes and then the floss and sponges from a couple of AquaClear hang-ons.

 

[TwoTankAmin]

The One and Only arrived late yesterday afternoon. I added it all last evening and covered the tank to keep it dark when the sun came up today. I did not add any more ammonium chlorlide as I tested prior to adding the new bacteria. It was dark outside and I had been viewing test results with sunlight. But under artificial light the readings looked a tad higher. Either way, I had about 1.5 to just under 2 ppm showing. Earlier tests put it at 1.5.

I am getting ready to test shortly. I will report results after I do so.

 

[TwoTankAmin]

The earlier test above was in the range of 1.5+. The evening test was just below 1.0 ppm. Finally some movement. I would hope to hit 0 ppm tomorrow before noon, but before the end of the day for sure. I plan to add ammonium chloride to produce 4 ppm or a tad over. "The game is afoot."

Here is the funny part of this. The bacteria came from Amazon and it came in one of their oversize vans. We have a circular driveway in front of the house which was built in 1961. The house has some covered walkways and the entrance has an overhang which goes into the circle. It is only possible for cars and other not too tall vehicles to drive completely around the circle. Wider vehicles which will also be taller cannot drive around. Taller vans cannot either. To complicate things, we are rebuilding a part of our deck and there was a pile of lumber in the driveway.

The Amazon driver tried to do the circle and realized he would hit the overhang. He needed to back up around the circle. To complicate things, we are rebuilding a part of our deck and there was a pile of lumber in the driveway which restricted how he had to back up.

He could not figure out how to do this. I had to guide him into the proper position to start and then when to turn the steering wheel which way when to stop turning it. I had to have him come forward to readjust etc. The poor guy had no clue how to drive the van in reverse. The big mirrors on either side of the van (and I assume the back-up camera) did not help him.

About 35 years ago a UPS driver on his first day on the job made the same mistake, only he took out the overhang with a big brown roll-up back door truck.

 

[TwoTankAmin]

Just tested about 15 minutes ago. 0.75 ppm. Too slow, imo, but it is progress. I will check again later tonight.

 

[TwoTankAmin]

Ammonia dropped slowly but steadily since I last posted. By Sat. late morning it read about .50+. I weeded in the sun for 2 hours and cleaned tanks yesterday and never tested last night as I fell asleep early. I tested about 20 minutes ago at 0 ppm. My guess was is was there by this morning idf not last night.

Based on 1.2 gm of ammpnium chloride having produced about 3 to 3.5 ppm, I upped the amount to 1.5 gm and added it to the tank. I will be testing it in a few minutes to get a better idea of the concentration that produce. I was targeting a range of 4- 4.5 ppm.

Edit to add: I just tested- It was too much under 4.0 so i added another .2 gm of ammonium chloride.

 

[TwoTankAmin]

I tested ammonia about 30 minutes ago--> 1.0 ppm. that is about a 75% reduction in about 20 hours. Things are starting to move, finally ??

Now for the trick to getting the bio-far, up to processing 9+ ppm/day. Remember, one should never allow the level on a total ion kit to exceed 6.4 ppm. And if one wants to allow for testing errors, I would suggest 6.0 is a better max. and a tad lower would not be all that bad. The ideal set-up would have a mechanical.digital way to drip ammonia into the tank at a regular rate. I recall that Dr. Hovanec maintains 8 ppm in his bacteria cultivating tanks. I am not sure how and the article that used to be on his site on this topic is no longer there.

My plan is simple. I know I can add up to 5 ppm at one time when the farm is working at capacity. If the tank will zero that out in say 12 hours, I can re-dose that amount again. So in one day I can add 10 ppm of ammonia and have 0 ppm at the end of the day. I could also work a 3.33 ppm dosing 3 times a day etc, But I want the least work.

Some reading this may wonder what happens of the ammonia is not dosed on schedule. What if I am otherwise occupied? Unlikely as it sounds, the bacteria seem to become even better at what they do when ammonia is pulsed. That is, it can go from a lower level to a much greater level and the bacteria handle that fine. This was discovered in waste water treatment facilities where the levels of ammonia can often vary substantially,

Getting the bio-farm up to target gets this project to the real challenge. I am not sure how many or what size fish I will end up moving into the summer tanks. What I do know is that I can probably not do more than 2 tanks a day. By this I mean the current tanks not the new ones. The process requires that I break down the entire tank such that all that remains in it are about 1/2 the water, the fish and the heaters. Sometimes I have to detach the heaters because the plecos will try to hide behind them on the glass..

That gets me to the problem of gradations. With zebra placos it is simple, a zebra is a zebra. But with the L236 and L173 complexes. it is not so simple. There are differing grades of the fish because they are somewhat variable. The more desirable a given pattern is, the more expensive the fish gets. A certain amount of this is BS because the fish morph over time as they grow and age. The larger the fish gets, the closer to a more stable patter it gets. The bigger the fish the better in terms of how it ends up on appearance.

So i am not only grading by size/age. I must also grade on appearance. The 15 months of the pandemic with almost no sales did have one benefit. A fair number of my offspring have been growing. The downside is they have been pretty heavily stocked and the both grow and breeder tanks are full of offspring.

 

[TwoTankAmin]

Just managed to check the ammonia- it was 0.0. I did not get to check last night as it as a long day and I was in bed by 10, I would bet that It would be 0 had I tested last night. I need to do a water change and then a redose using 1.7 gm again, I may take it a tad higher but not more than 2 gm total. I will be set to get the tanks going when the farm can process 4.5 -5 ppm of ammonia in about 12 hours.

Water changes out on the terrace are a PITA. I have to get many gallons into a combo of 20 and 5 gal. containers. I have to fill them at close to the proper temp. This means I run close to a 100 ft. hose from the bathroom at one end of the house to the terrace which is at the other end. The hose runs through the living room.

For the bio-farm I need about 25 gals so it is not to bad. When the tanks are up and running it will take 90-100 gals per water change cycle. I usually divide it half and fill the containers twice.

I live in a very nice spot. We are in the woods and very private. But the house was not designed as a full time residence for a family. it was intended as a summer and weekend home. It is a split level build on a slab with neither a basement nor a second floor. Over the the first 20+ years it had a second smaller building added and then an in-ground swimming pool. It has no garage, only an open on 3 sides car-port. So my 26 tanks (including the summer tanks) are now spread across both buildings and in 5 different rooms.

 

[TwoTankAmin]

Last night I added 2 gm of the ammonium to the tank. I eaxpected to see it clearly over 5 ppm but for sure above the 4 ppm color on the API kit. But it looked to me to be closer to 4 even. I was up way too early today. I tested the tank just before 7 a.m. It was a tad under 2 ppm. I will test again about 7 tonight ar a bit earlier. I would expect to see it at 0 or very close.

What makes this all a bit interesting/challenging is the bacteria themselves. When I add the ammonium I need to allow a little time for it to circulate around the tank before I test. However, the bacteria do not know this and those that can get to consume away. If I was accurate on the first dose being in the 3.0+ range at 1.2 gm., then 2 gm is 1.666 times that or about 5.0 ppm. Yet 30 minutes after adding that 2 gm. I tested it clearly at right about 4.0. This means in 30 minutes the bacteria feasted. They had to have burned through 0.50 ppm.

And this gets us to some interesting facts re the bacteria. While the bacteria reproduce in response to their being more ammonia than their current numbers need to be thriving. It is not as well known in the hobby that the bacteria have the ability to increase how much they can handle before they get to where they are triggered to reproduce.

And this leads us to the fact that nobody has any idea what the oxidation capacity of a single bacterial cell is. What is known is whether a given colony is able to process X ammonia or that they cannot do so. We have no idea how many individual cells are at work in any of our tanks. Nor does science. And this leads me to question a lot of the research into ammonia oxidizing Archaea. The way the numbers of bacteria or Archaea are measured is by counting AMO genes. AMO is essential for oxidizing ammonia. The problem is nobody know the capacity to process ammonia for a single bacterial v.s. and Archaeal cell. Thinks of it this way. Suppose we have a group of males and that half are adults over 21 and half are children 12 and under. Lets further assume that the way we count these males is by counting their sex chromosomes. We would count Y chrimosomes.

Humans have 23 pairs of chromosomes. One pair consists of sex chromosomes . They come in two forms: X’s and Y’s. Women have two X’s. So when they share half of each pair of chromosomes with their offspring, the sex chromosome they offer will always be an X. Men have an X and a Y.

This would lead us to count all of the members of the group as male. However, if we then assume that each half can lift the same weight, we will be making a mistake in what we conclude. And this is the problem I have with the research I read on the two ammonia oxidizing microorganisms. We know that the Archaea can thrive on low levels of ammonia. They do well at levels where the bacteria cannot. This is similar to the way different bacteria colonize tanks v.s. those found in waste water treatment.

 

[TwoTankAmin]

I was behind schedule tonight. I tested at 8 pm and, as expected, 0.0 ammonia. I dosed 2 grams of ammonium chloride again.

Considering the first bottle of Dr. Tim's was bad, things really started last Tuesday evening. Here it is 8 days later and the tank is processing about 5 ppm of ammonia in a day. With a bit of luck I should have all the filters ready to go in a few days.