Washing Your Bio

[skjl47]

I wash my Biological filtration with tap water.

hello; I also do this from time to time. I use a garden hose when it is warm enough outside.

why you need to clean the balls?

fish poop gets trapped and keeps the water from flowing.

Hello; I guess my take on this results from 50+ years of getting away with the practice, some microbiology training and what I think I understand about the dynamic relationship of bacteria colonies.
First let me say I do take some precautions so as to not kill off too many beneficial bacteria (bb). I keep back some media and do not clean everything all at one time. I also keep a couple of sponge filter bases in the back of filters in the hope they will house some bb colonies.

Back in my undergraduate biology classes we made up culture media to put in petri dishes. Usually some form of agar-agar or blood agar. We would then apply various bacteria to the sterilized agar media in order to learn about the bacteria.
The bacteria would grow very quickly on culture media in a petri dish for a few days and then growth would slow and essentially pretty much stop. There would be a very large amount of nutrient remaining that the bacteria colonies could use but they did not. The explaination given was they sort of poisoned them selves because they had no plumbing. Sure they had a super abundance of "food" but no way to get rid of their own waste. The accumulation of the waste eventually was a toxin and stopped the growth of a colony. Some colonies might stop at dime size and others maybe would get to slightly bigger than a quarter.
Of course if there was some way a few of the bacteria got moved to another spot then a new colony would form. But in a covered petri dish there was no wind so that did not much happen.

What am I driving at? One thing that always seemed to me is from time to time the bio-media needs a good cleaning. This gives the bb a fresh place to colonize. Gentle rinsing in tank or conditioned water seems ok for a while but eventually it needs a good cleaning. I guess since I had been using a hose for decades before joining these fish forums I had some experience to fall back on.
I do not know how new fish keepers can judge these things. I am aware from reading posts the last nine years that the gentle rinse in old tank water is sort of a fish keeping "gospel".

I have also learned that the bb are sessile and stick well to the surfaces they colonize. I have not done any sort of check but do suspect that even with a hose rinse not all are removed. I do not usually scrub the media surface unless the build up is bad. I figure it is better to clean away the gunk that can smother the bb colonies even if I wash away some of the bb.

 

[esoxlucius]

Here's the thing with this hobby. We come into it all green and because we don't know anything at first all the habits you pick up over the months and years tend to be from what you have read about, or what someone has told you about. We are all led to believe that washing your filtration media in tap water is the worst single thing you can do in the hobby.

And so, as a result, we never wash our filtration media in tap water even though we have little understanding of the chemistry involved. Not only do we not wash our media in tap water but to anyone who asks we tell them "oh you must never do that". And so it goes on, until before you know it, it is fish keeping law. And yes, I have always adhered to this "law".

But when I came back into the hobby a couple of years ago after 15 or so years away I was older and wiser and started tinkering more and tried to understand the complexities of the hobby more. I used to wash all media in tank water. Then I started washing my mechanical in tap water to clean it properly instead of rinsing it around in dirty tank water and defeating the object. I reckoned that killing any bacteria in my mechanical didn't matter because my bio side would compensate. And did I have any crashes or spikes? No.

Then, slowly but surely, due to my bio chamber in my sump being stuffed with all sorts of bio media and not working as efficient as it should, I started thinning out my media over the months and losing chunks of this and bags of that. My bio section in my sump is as now as sparse as it has ever been and have I had any crashes or spikes? No.

It would not surprise me one iota if there was enough BB in an aquarium on the glass alone to keep a tank running. I firmly believe that we all greatly underestimate the power of our little friends we call beneficial bacteria.

 

[headbanger_jib]

Earlier when I hadn't plumbed my tanks for draining, I used to wash the media in stored water, now that all my tanks are drilled and plumbed, it's easier for me to wash media in tank water.

 

[RD.]

t would not surprise me one iota if there was enough BB in an aquarium on the glass alone to keep a tank running

I can state with 100% certainty that is not the case. Not even close. lol I have seen tanks crash due to someone washing their filter media under the tap. Chlorine/chloramine are definitely toxins to BB, and most aquatic organisms. Although I do agree that most people worry too much about how much BB they have in their systems.

I live in California...everything is treated as if it had the plague.

That doesn't tell me anything about disinfectant residuals at your tap. It could be anywhere from 0-3+ ppm. Without that data no real conclusion can be drawn. IME a large portion of this hobby have no idea what those residuals are.


My bio loads are typically small enough in my tanks to easily run off of my bio ring bags, while my mechanical media could be cleaned under the tap. I don't like to recommend that practice on public forums as everyone's tap disinfectant residuals are different, as are everyone's set up. This is similar to those who don't add water conditioner while doing water changes. For some folks with low disinfectant residuals this practice is quite safe, for others the result is a tank that is totally wiped out, and a bunch of dead fish. I've seen both scenarios here on MFK over the years.

Chlorine/chloramine are oxidizing agents, and are known toxins to most aquatic organisms. Their sole purpose in treating municipal water is to kill bacteria.

From the EPA ....


http://www.epa.gov/chemfact/s_chlori.txt




V. ENVIRONMENTAL EFFECTS

A. Toxicity to Aquatic Organisms

Chlorine has high acute toxicity to aquatic organisms; many toxicity
values are less than or equal to 1 mg/L. Twenty-four-hour LC50
values range from 0.076 to 0.16 mg/L for Daphnia magna (water flea)
and from 0.005 to 0.1 mg/L for Daphnia pulex (cladocern)
(AQUIRE 1994); 48-hour LC50 values range from 5.3 to 12.8 mg/L for
Nitocra spinipes (snail); and 96-hour LC50 values range from 0.13
to 0.29 mg/L for Oncorhynchus mykiss (rainbow trout), from 0.1 to
0.18 mg/L for Salvelinus fontinalis (brook trout), and from
0.71-0.82 mg/L for Lepomis cyanellus (green sunfish) (AQUIRE 1994).
Papillomas of the oral cavity in fish have been associated
with exposure to chlorinated water supplies (NTP 1992).

Low level chlorination (0.05 to 0.15 mg/L) results in significant
shifts in the species composition of marine phytoplankton
communities (HSDB 1994).

 

[Tarsun]

i have an two canisters that i use on my 90. one is all mech and the other is all bio.
i backwash the bio filter once a week and clean the mech canister every 3 months or so (well water)
every so often i will take all the bio media out and rinse it in the tub (well water) BUT never at the same time that i clean the mech filter.

 

[celebrist]

I am lucky enough to be on a well so no worries there. I do however avoid rinsing all my bio at once and rotate cleanings instead at about one third of my media at a time

 

[duanes]

I agree with RD that your tap water disinfection residual will determine the bacterial die off, if/when you rinse bio media in tap water.
As a retired water microbiologist i find bacteria are very often much more sensitive to slight alterations in environmental conditions than expected.
Although the water provider I worked for, had colonies of ammonia consuming bacteria living in the distribution system, the most robust, and largest populations were far from the chloramine addition point, my house was very close and often came out of the tap at more at a higher residual than 1ppm.

For this reason, I kept most bio media in mesh bags, and shook them around in buckets of old tank water during water changes to remove excess gunk that can smother the needed aerobic biofilm on media., rather than risk the chance of a kill off in chlorinated water.

 

[skjl47]

Hello; Perhaps if we look at this from a slightly different point of view. From time to time over 5+ decades my filter equipment has broken or just failed and had to be replaced. Maybe I wanted to try the newest shinny object (filters in this discussion) in a fish shop.
My guess being most, if not all, of the more experienced fish keepers have some sort of practice to keep the bb going. If we think of "cleaning" bio-media in this sort of context maybe it can make more sense. I do not argue that we toss all bb loaded media and thus get into a mini-cycle situation.

To another point. I ran tanks with no filtration at all. Ran tanks with only air operated filtration for well over a decade that had very low flow. Ran the various forms of the early power filters which could have decent flow but were not reliable in several ways. All during those decades I had successful tanks as did other fish keepers of the time. If we had not been able to keep tanks going in those times, neither us nor you would now be able to have the modern equipment.
I like the new power filters. They are self priming after a power outage. I do not have to restart a siphon every few days. They have plenty of flow. I still run some sort of air bubbler in all my tanks as a just in case. So many times a bubbler filter of some sort has kept my tanks alive over time when the then "newest" type of power filter had failed for who knew how many hours or days. ( I would come home from a three day weekend to find only the bubblers running.)
Enough for now but there are other aspects to this topic.

 

[skjl47]

your tap water disaffection residual will determine the bacterial die off, if/when you rinse bio media in tap water.

First let me say I do take some precautions so as to not kill off too many beneficial bacteria (bb). I keep back some media and do not clean everything all at one time. I also keep a couple of sponge filter bases in the back of filters in the hope they will house some bb colonies.

kept most bio media in mesh bags, and shook them around in buckets of old tank water during water changes to remove excess gunk that can smother the needed aerobic biofilm on media., rather than risk the chance of a kill off in chlorinated water.

Hello; Point taken. That being you can kill off bb with tap water which is why I made the above statement about being careful to preserve some significant portion of bb loaded media when I do decide to clean bio-media. My argument is not that cleaning with tap water is risk free. Rather that at some point a more thorough cleaning of the media has seemed the better choice than allowing the bb to be smothered in gunk.

This topic appears to be among those with very different opinions similar to how to treat ich or the use of UGF's. Best as I can tell from reading is that some take the "rinse in old tank water" practice to mean that the toss away filter floss is also used that way. I tried it a few times after reading some posts and did indeed loosen some detritus from the floss, but I was putting dirty floss back into my filter. I stopped reusing such floss and went back to tossing the nasty stuff.

 

[celebrist]

Yep I remember when I upgraded my aquarium keeping and got rid of all those old air pump filters now decades later I have an air pump running on every one of my tanks with a sponge of some sort