This makes me glad I canceled my pre-order. I was worried the fleece roll would cost me a fortune. I'm still using the filter cups with Poly-fill. A bag lasts me close to 2months so $4 a month.July 20. The Good, The Bad & The Ugly
So it's been just over a month now that I've been using the new Red Sea ReefMat. Here are the pros, cons and various observations that I've made during this timeframe.
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The Good. If you hate (and I mean absolutely, abhorrently despise) cleaning filter socks - this is definitely the way to go. Reconfiguring the sump is not too terribly difficult (albeit time consuming), and once running it performs flawlessly. Changing fleece rolls is effortless and there is a noticeable noise/splash reduction in your sump.
View attachment 2754516The Bad. If you have a heavily stocked tank like mine, you're going to use more fleece. Potentially a lot more. Right now I'm averaging 8-10 days per roll which works out to $75 CAD/month. So arguably I've blown my budget right out of the water here, but in fairness I haven't worked out the time/laundering costs for my stash of filter socks, either. It was probably running me at least $25 in water, electricity and OxiClean - plus the time mercilessly scrubbing everything. And I haven't factored in the cost of replacement filter socks, which was probably in the very near future.
The initial spike in Week 1 was where I was using the integrated filter basket with the active carbon Red Sea so generously included. This actually ended up inhibiting water flow and causing premature fleece consumption. Around Day 5 I'd figured out the culprit and use has been fairly consistent since.
The small "spikes" you see are when I replaced a fleece roll and had to slightly advance the unit (I've since refined my procedure so this has been reduced somewhat since.
The Ugly. Well, by the title you know there was going to be be some, so like with a bandaid - best to just rip it off. The fleece rolls Red Sea provides are 200-microns and I'd previously been using 100-micron filter socks. So despite using more fleece and doing a better overall job - anything smaller than 200-microns is getting through. And this has led to higher nitrates and more of the general algae that accumulates on the glass. So I'm also cleaning the glass more often.
As you can see, nitrates have jumped up by about 15ppm and remained somewhere between 35-45ppm. None of my inverts, fish or corals seem to have been affected - but it's obviously starting to get outside my comfort zone. I haven't added lot of fish (the few have all been really small), feeding hasn't changed and I've actually cut back on coral feedings from 2x to 1x per week. Fish do grow, though. On the nitrate chart, the nitrate level from Feb to mid-April was actually off due to a faulty test kit (so nitrates were in reality probably in the 15-25ppm range).
I'm not running the same amount of MarinePure spheres, though (maybe a third of what I had, just because I didn't have any additional baskets for them), and with the reconfiguration of the sump the water no longer passes from the overflow past all the media blocks - so it's entirely possible that I may need to rethink this. Relocating the Sicce pump for the UV is logistically problematic, so the best option may be to just obtain a larger Tunze powerhead and replace the smaller Sicce Voyager Nano.
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On the plus side, phosphates haven't really changed. If anything they've actually gone down slightly which is fine by me. The drop at the end of April was where I was trying to get nitrates/phosphates under control and dosed too much NOPOX - bottoming it out.
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I've resumed NOPOX dosing, but my phosphates are already fairly low so I'll have to monitor this closely to avoid them bottoming out again. I'm on the fence with the Polyp Lab Genesis rocks I added. It should be enough to keep nitrates in check for a tank twice my size, but with the reduction in filtration from 100 to 200-microns it's also possible they are working - and that nitrates would've been even higher.
So the plan to tackle my nitrates is going to be three-fold:
1. Add-in the remainder of the MarinePure spheres (these will take some time to seed, though).
2. Look at upgrading the Sicce wavemaker.
3. Resume daily/semi-daily NOPOX dosing.