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Brilliant topic
#brandon429
How do you measure surface are based on a picture? Or did I miss understood?
Surface area is tridimensional. The internal structure of the media (rock) will play a vital role on how much is usable, as you said yourself (w example). The roughness of the surface area is another place where a picture isn't going to tell you much.
It definitely possible to have ramp up periods if the load is increased high enough and fast enough or the media reduced enough. What I believe is that we never do that in our reef tanks. However, its pretty common place in my field of work (aquaculture), where we are close to the edge often.
I think part of the miss understanding is just how little surface area you actually need to achieve ammonia conversion. Typical rule of thumb is 100m2 per kg of dried aquaculture feed. 100 m2 isn't that much. I know bioballs are out of favor this days, but to get 100m2 you would only need about 133l of media (assuming 750m2/m3). Assuming a 50% fill (and no safety margin), you could get a 260l barrel (approx 70g), fill it with media and aeration and have a biofilter capable of filtering 1kg of dried feed a day.
Almost no one as an aquarium that consumes 1kg of pellets a day. So most of our filtration is over dimensioned.
#Aqua Man You could start both tanks the same, and they would still not end up in the exact same amounts. (I have plenty of data from recirc systems to back this up). Its biology as its simplest. Its likely that the exact bacterial communities will be slightly different as well.
How much practical application does this topic have? Probably not massive, but very interesting anyway.
As for the OP. I don't think you could measure the exact numbers for the reasons stated above. You could in the water phase (and you would have to assume the water is completely mixed). You could also take samples from rock, but to have a exact number, that I don't think is possible.
#brandon429
How do you measure surface are based on a picture? Or did I miss understood?
Surface area is tridimensional. The internal structure of the media (rock) will play a vital role on how much is usable, as you said yourself (w example). The roughness of the surface area is another place where a picture isn't going to tell you much.
It definitely possible to have ramp up periods if the load is increased high enough and fast enough or the media reduced enough. What I believe is that we never do that in our reef tanks. However, its pretty common place in my field of work (aquaculture), where we are close to the edge often.
I think part of the miss understanding is just how little surface area you actually need to achieve ammonia conversion. Typical rule of thumb is 100m2 per kg of dried aquaculture feed. 100 m2 isn't that much. I know bioballs are out of favor this days, but to get 100m2 you would only need about 133l of media (assuming 750m2/m3). Assuming a 50% fill (and no safety margin), you could get a 260l barrel (approx 70g), fill it with media and aeration and have a biofilter capable of filtering 1kg of dried feed a day.
Almost no one as an aquarium that consumes 1kg of pellets a day. So most of our filtration is over dimensioned.
#Aqua Man You could start both tanks the same, and they would still not end up in the exact same amounts. (I have plenty of data from recirc systems to back this up). Its biology as its simplest. Its likely that the exact bacterial communities will be slightly different as well.
How much practical application does this topic have? Probably not massive, but very interesting anyway.
As for the OP. I don't think you could measure the exact numbers for the reasons stated above. You could in the water phase (and you would have to assume the water is completely mixed). You could also take samples from rock, but to have a exact number, that I don't think is possible.