Originally Posted by
SoCalDiscus.com
Speaking of what Tom said here, this raises a good point! Algae scrubbers were bit back in the day especially on marine tanks until they were replaced with a refugium where live macro and micro algae was grown to remove Nitrates (the one thing bacteria helped very little with). Most Discus owners are doing major water changes especially when they have bare tanks because there is little or no bacteria to remove Ammonia, and sponge filters only helps some to convert that to Nitrites. For what is converted from Nitrite to Nitrate, it's "Live Plants" that are missing from the equasion here and for a fraction of the money I would only "suggest" that some of you (myself included) try working with a freshwater refugium. I'll do some research on what pulls the most Nitrates out for us and one thing that "may be interesting to some" is that one of my biggest sellers when I was in the business was mangrove pods that can bought off ebay really cheap. Yes, mangroves are used in saltwater refugiums but they are brackish and live in freshwater also so they may work equally well with a good amount of other plants. What we need to find though are plants that tollerate high temperatures (maybe dwarf lillies???). An important thing to remember is lighting is required 24/7 for this to work because where as when photosynthesis takes place during lighting hours to remove nitrate, it also removes CO2 from the water and converts it to Oxygen. But, at night if you turn the lights off on the refugium, the opposite occurs and Oxygen is sucked up and converted to CO2 thus causing a dip in pH! This is harmfull to reef systems and I can see where the same caution should be with sensitive Discus.
There may be an equal solution of results of creating a freshwater refugium over a far more expensive nitrate system especially if you combine it with a autofill system of both auto dump and auto fill through a nice 5-6 stage RODI system. (LOOKS LIKE I'LL BE DOING SOME NERDY EXPERIMENTING NOW)...
Just Sayin'