Sulfur Denitrator Build Thread

[hawkinsrgk]

Around 6 months ago my nitrates got out of control and I lost at least half of all my coral. I removed the sandbed (or most of it), nitrates went down to 2ppm and I thought all was good. Now they are going back up again and are somewhere between 24ppm and 32ppm. So I am going to give this a shot.

Here are the parts

Those are two toilet flanges that are in the sunlight.

 

[hawkinsrgk]

Here is a pic of it put together. I made both reactors with 4 inch PVC pipe and 3 feet tall. Each reactor will hold a little over 2 gallons of media.

 

[hawkinsrgk]

The reactor on the left will be for the sulfur and matrix. The reactor will be for calcium media.

Leak tested it last night and this morning and found that I have two leaks that need to be fixed.

The reactor on the left is leaking between the 1/2 cpvc fitting and the main pipe. The reactor on the right is leaking between the main pipe and the female adapter. Hopefully those wont be too hard to fix since I really don't want to start over.

 

[hawkinsrgk]

The two gate valves that I ordered from usplastics came in last night. I needed to make a new feed water line for the sulfur reactor and went ahead and added a gate valve to the carbon/gfo reactor.

Pic of the whole setup. This is starting to look complicated.

 

[hawkinsrgk]

I have read several posts about people using ORP controllers to control the drip rate. However the issue is that ORP control in the positive values and in order to do this you have to control in the negative. One workaround that I read about was reversing the polarity on the ORP probe. Since I have a reefkeeper lite and a SLX already and BRS has a sale on ORP probes thought I would see if I could get this working. I talked to Digital Aquatics to see if the SLX could read in the negative values. They said no, but they are working on doing this in a future release.

So at this point I went to the network guy at work and asked him if he could make me a BNC male to female cable with the polarity reversed on one end. He went into extreme detail for 15-20 minutes on how that was not possible. I have seen people on forums and youtube talking about doing it so I was pretty sure it was possible. He then explained that if it was possible he wanted to see how someone could do it. At this point I was back to square one.

 

[hawkinsrgk]

I have now this little saving grace.

 

[hawkinsrgk]

This is a BNC connector adapter to a Ethernet plug. It uses pins 4 and 5 to connect from the Ethernet cable to the BNC connector.

So I went back to the network guy and asked. Can you make me a Cat 5 cable with pins 4 and 5 reversed on one end? Whoo Hoo. I asked the correct question and he said yes

 

[hawkinsrgk]

He is a pick of the patch cable that he made

Hopefully this works and I didn't waste money on an ORP probe.

 

[hawkinsrgk]

I went to set everything up today and the 1/4 fittings doesn't drain from the first pipe to the second. Guess I will make them 1/2 inch and see if that helps. Kinda bummed

 

[sundog101]

What's the flow rate?
Also how high did your nitrates get?

 

[hawkinsrgk]

What's the flow rate?
Also how high did your nitrates get?

I don't understand the flow rate question. The flow rate out of the reactor was 0. I filled the top of the reactor and it didn't drain for two hours

I took out the 1/4 fillings and replaced it with 1/2 fittings and it seems to be working now

I'm letting it sit in the garage now to make sure the new fittings don't leak

Nitrates are between 24 and 32

 

[sundog101]

Oh, I didn't get how it was set up.

 

[hawkinsrgk]

Sorry about that. I should have explained it more clearly

There is a T fitting off the return pump that has a gate valve in it. The return pump is a reeflo hammerhead so it can supply more than enough water for what I need

That T supply goes into the T fitting on the CPVC fitting. Water is circulated with a max jet power head in the first pipe. The first pipe has sulfur at the bottom and matrix at the top. Once water goes to the top of the pipe it drains into the bottom of the second pipe

The second pipe has calcium aggregate to increase the ph of the water coming out of the first pipe

Once it's cycled the water coming out of the top of the second pipe should have 0 nitrate

 

[hawkinsrgk]

The ORP probe will be used to determine when more water should be added to the reactor.

 

[sundog101]

Ok that makes sense. I've never used a sulphur denitrator but I did try a similar setup, just not a denitrator. I got the crazy idea to make a protein skimmer connected to a refugium tube I guess is what you would call it. Basically two pvc tubes connected with water flowing down the first pipe and up the second. The skimmer would over flow and I found my "gate valve" from ace was not a true gate valve and couldn't handle the flow rate. Anyway I don't know it that helps you but I hope you get it working :D

 

[hawkinsrgk]

Thanks for the tip. I just got it setup. Don't think there are any leaks, but I should know by the end of the day. The 1/2 inch drains make it work a lot better

 

[hawkinsrgk]

Here is a pic with the 1/2 drain

Got it attached and filtering water

 

[greg 45]

measuring orp isn't needed / you can monitor what comes out with a nitrate test kit.

 

[hawkinsrgk]

Re-calibrated the ph probe and even with a gallon of aggregate it's still a little lower than the tank water

 

[hawkinsrgk]

Got a spare reefkeeper pc4 hooked up that will control the solenoid. So now hoping it doesn't leak and waiting for the ORP probe