Bio Balls?

[Stan]

I have a whack of bio balls I picked up last week in a package deal with some other supplies. (guy is switching to reptiles) My question is, are bio balls an effective growth media for BB when fully submerged? I don't have room to add a trickle tower on top my sump.
Cheers

 

[matubula]

I dont know how good they are compared to using sponge/foam or ceramic media but I would guess they are probably the worse.

A very simple test I use to judge how effective a media will be is to see how long it will retain water. My very crude logic is that the more porous the material and the more surface area it has, the more water it will retain. I 'test' media basically the same way twice. Either dunk the basket of media in water or slowly pour water onto it.

From doing this, plastic is bottom, foam/sponge is middle, ceramics are top. But one major advantage of plastic media is its ease of cleaning, mainly because it traps very little debris. I do use a fair amount of plastic media, my panaque pond filter is full of it.

 

[Stan]

I totally see what you're saying, but I also see guys using chopped drinking straws or bunched up fishing line for the same purpose so I have a huge(65 gallon) sump which to fill with sintered glass or coral chips is gonna cost a mint so if I fill a chamber, perhaps 15-20 gallons with these bio balls are they going to do any good at all? Or am I better to buyy coral or the like?:dk:

 

[dw1305]

Hi all,
Hi Stan they are better when they are used in trickle filters, but they will still work in an internal filter. The reason they are good for trickle filters is that the shape of the grooving distributes a thin film of water all over the ball's internal and external surfaces allowing the bacteria film to receive large amounts of oxygen. As Matt says they are also easy to clean, and they don't support a large microbial biomass, in both cases this is because they have nothing like the pore space of sintered glass, ceramics etc. Assuming that the water going through the balls in the sump is fairly fully oxygenated? and you don't have a huge fish load? I wouldn't think that you should have a problem with using them.

cheers Darrel

 

[Stan]

Cheers Darrel,
I'm using them for now in one chamber with coral and sintered glass in another, foam, and floss in the first one. I'll change it out later as I add more fish. for now there's just a few smaller Cichlid hbrids.