Will Bioballs Leach Copper?

[sundog101]

Lets say I use bioballs for a biofilter in my QT. Then I run copper and whatever other meds that may be needed during quarantine. Once I'm done, can I wash the bioballs and put them back in the display to re-seed the QT when needed? Will the bioballs leach copper or other meds? Thanks for the advice!

 

[ZoWhat]

Soak them in a 5g bucket full of vinegar for a week....then rinse the heck out of them....then soak 5g bucket in RODI for 3 days....then buy a Copper test and test the RODI

Then you'll know the answer

 

[sundog101]

Will do

 

[lion king]

Bio balls are plastic right, I doubt they will even absorb copper. But if they do, they will release the copper back into the water and eventually zero out. You can run cuprizorb or use a poly filter to remove the copper, running cuprizorb a couple of weeks after your copper test shows zero usually mops up any leaching, along with water changes of course. Washing or soaking and such would likely do nothing if copper was actually absorbed, allowing the copper to leach back into the water and then removed until zero'd out is the best route. I've had full reefs with inverts growing in displays that were treated with copper, if properly removed it can be 100% and cause no future concern.

 

[Mark Gray]

I would not think they would absorb copper

 

[4FordFamily]

Probably not but a bag of curisorb in the sump is a great choice anyway when in doubt.

 

[falconut]

From what I understand about biopellets, bacteria grows on the pellets & slowly eats the pellets. If you rinse or soak them in vinegar you'll be washing away this bacteria & have to start the setup process all over.

I've run biopellets with cupramine & just ran cuprisorb for 3-4 weeks after reading 0 on the test kits. You should be fine doing this.