More bio balls means less nitrate?

[PotatoPig]

Well in that case I'm hoping the rock and sand will be plenty for the pair of clowns and a few inverts going in the tank

Unless you have a tank crash or something large dies and doesn’t get removed I’m not sure it’s possible for ammonia production to exceed the ammonia/nirtite processing capacity of even very modest rock quantities.

About the only scenario I can see for bio balls might be for an LFS where they often run temporarily heavily stocked tanks with no rockwork.

I have a 10g QT tank set up but dormant for a month or so. I’m going to try an experiment on it to see if a golf ball sized piece of live rock (from my main tank sump) can process 2ppm ammonia in a reasonable timeframe with no lighting or any other cycled media.

 

[ryshark]

Both. The plastic ones are almost never useful, IMO. Ceramic ones may have pros and cons, but I still do not recommend them.

I use this plastic basket inside of this holder for my drain down to my sump. I like to use filter pads, so instead of filling the entire cup up with several cut pads, I stacked a bunch of the plastic bio balls in the cup to hold up a single layer of filter pad. Learning what you said about them taking ammonia from my acros (my fish load is already kinda low) I’m going to remove all the plastic balls. Since I can’t just put a pad in the bottom of the cup, I’ll buy some poly-fil filter floss instead and pack that into the cup. Thanks.

 

[JasonVH]

OP- I'm glad you started this thread.

Responders- I'm glad for your responses.

Learned something quite new to me! Have sand and likely 'overloaded' on rock in setup. I will admit to adding some ceramic 'biomedia' to the HOB thinking it could only help. Nitrates have been rising between water changes. Think I'll try tossing out the ceramic stuff out and see how that goes.

 

[ryshark]

I use this plastic basket inside of this holder for my drain down to my sump. I like to use filter pads, so instead of filling the entire cup up with several cut pads, I stacked a bunch of the plastic bio balls in the cup to hold up a single layer of filter pad. Learning what you said about them taking ammonia from my acros (my fish load is already kinda low) I’m going to remove all the plastic balls. Since I can’t just put a pad in the bottom of the cup, I’ll buy some poly-fil filter floss instead and pack that into the cup. Thanks.

I pulled out my bio-balls and replaced the chamber with Poly-Fil 6-days ago and my ALK consumption decreased slightly. Not sure if it's coincidence or not, but it was the only change.