Sulphur Denitrater

[Heliman]

I am just jumping in to my first experiences with Sulphur as a means of Nitrate control.

I read everything I can on the subject and I think I have a reasonable understanding of the practices and principles.........(I hope !!!)

There are a couple of questions that I could use some advice on:

1) I have a spare K2R (recirculating)Calcium reactor and I plan to use this as the basic sulphur container, the output can be adjusted to any value I dial in to the flow meter. Is there any problems with doing it this way, rather than buying a dedicated, specialised unit.

2) The use of Aragonite as a "second stage" I understand is for correcting PH of the effluent. My question is....does the denitrification process rob Calcium from the effluent, and does the Aragonite slowly disolve and release calcium/alkalinity. My reason for the query centers around the imbalances I might get with Calcium and KH levels as I currently dose Randy 2 part and both Ca and Alk are very, very stable...I would not want to disturb this situation too much if I can possibly avoid it. If I am adding Calcium from the denitrater output, then I risk having to shift away from the equal dosing of Randy Part 1 and 2, which dont sound too good to me !!

Also, I prefer to use a seperate reaction tower to hold the aragonite, leading the effluent into this tower from the denitrater....I dont want to mix both sulphur and aragonite in the K2R...does this semm a reasonable thing to do ?

Any advice would be appreciated

[Tigé21v]

Your calcium reactor will work fine. And it's supposed to be better to run the aragonite in a separate stage.
The denitrifier will lower your alk. The anaerobic state inside the reactor will lower the effluent's ph. It will dissolve the aragonite, but nowhere near as effectively as a calcium reactor. The alk released pretty much replaces what the denitrifier consumes, but your calcium will rise, though in my experience, not significantly.
Have you read over the DIY SD thread? It's quite lengthy, but has lots of good info. The last few pages seem to have a lot of pertinent info.
http://reefcentral.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1400576&page=22
I'm in the process of trying to set mine up so it'll be controlled by an ORP probe. I'm having a heck of a time trying to figure out how to make a jumper cable to reverse the probe's polarity so my Milwaukee controller will work. (The SD works in negative ORP ranges.)
HTH

[Heliman]

Thanks for that info.

I have begun to wade through the SD Thread.........heaps of stuff to digest !!

Regarding ORP...

As I understand it, you need your controller to activate a small circulation pump when a low ORP set point is reached, and switch it off when the higher (but still low by normal standards) is reached ???

I have had a try with my Neptune controller and instead of hooking the ORP output to the Ozoniser, I hooked it up to a small eheim....the controller does not know it is now operating a pump instead of an ozone generator.

Seems to work OK, but I have not yet got any real low ORP's against which to test it. That comes later when I finally get my SD on line :reading:

[rjd0521]

I have a Midwest Aquatics and am happy with it. Keep my tank at 0 nitrate at all time. I have tried many different reactor including a calcium reactor but it did not work as well so per experience, go with a reactor made for it such as the Midwest or the Korallin. I got the Midwest on Ebay for $40. As for the media, I would recommend the ARM media or you can use the Seachem Matrix if you have a bigger thank so you can have more media for culturing bacteria.

[Tigé21v]

I plan on setting it up similar to having a RO flush line, with a solenoid on the "flush "line. The solenoid will open when the ORP drops to a low enough level.

[keithhays]

I just started with the Geos Reef version about 2 months ago. I would definitely separate the coral skeletons from the sulfur. As of about the 6 week mark the dissolved skeletons coated and then clogged the sulfur forcing me to take a part the reactor, clean the sulfur, and move the coral to a different container thus restarting the whole process. I am not certain how well small granules of arragonite would work vs the large coral skeletons, but it would seem the arragonite would quickly become a solid mass.

A couple other things I have noticed is that, at least on my reactor, if something were to go wrong with the pump and I have to remove it, it drains the reactor so I may need to mod it to place some sort of valve on either side of it.