High Tide Aquatics

Running Carbon: An interesting recommendation from Polyplab

I run carbon in a reactor daily, changing it out every 2 weeks. I suspect many of you do some variation of this and it has worked fine. However, I was researching Polyplab's pro carbon and came across an interesting thread on reef2reef. In a nutshell, someone mentioned Polyplab's recommended practice was to only run carbon for 2 days per month, which is contrary to what a lot of us are accustomed to. At some point in the thread, someone posted Polyplab's response to the issue.... which states that while there is no harm running it daily (we already know this), "the use of activated carbon on a long period while using acids, fuel or colors would be a waste of these 3x products since carbon would suck it out of the tank." This is why they recommend using activated carbon only few days a month.

I thought this was pretty interesting. Does anyone adopt this practice? What are everyone's thoughts on this?

Reef2reef thread: https://www.reef2reef.com/threads/polyplab-pro-carbon.313775/
 
Carbon will pull stuff out of the water, this is how it cleans "yellow water" and removes "toxins" so yeah... it'll also clean out stuff you swear for realsies is good :D
 
Carbon will pull stuff out of the water, this is how it cleans "yellow water" and removes "toxins" so yeah... it'll also clean out stuff you swear for realsies is good :D
True, but then why do people run carbon 24/7 esp if they also dose trace, acids and fuels?


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk
 
Probably the same reason people use filter socks and clean them out on a weekly basis. Sometimes we simply do things that don't exactly jive well together.

If people run carbon 24/7 then they shouldn't dose that other stuff, just as simple as that.

For me I only run carbon in emergencies, it's just too much of a potential detritius trap, and it really does need to be changed regularly, but it is a very powerful tool to the point that it can very easily strip the water if of stuff you do want if you're not careful and use too much.

Think of like a protein skimmer, there are times you do want to turn your skimmer off because you don't want it pulling out what you put into the tank, certain foods, etc, sometimes you even just turn off your return pump so water stays in the main tank while everything feeds and what not.
 
Back
Top