Bioballs...bah! Back around 30 or so years ago, they were what the Cool Kids used. A store I frequented in Toronto...the original PJ's Pets at Yonge and Steeles...had a glass-walled filter room containing the central filter for all their tanks, the main feature of which was a giant transparent cylinder full of Bioballs and set up as a trickle filter. I always got a chuckle from the gearhead-aquarists who went in there to look at the filter rather than the fish. 
I guess at some point in the ensuing years, Bioballs became old-hat and boring. The new successor to the throne was K1, but only if you had it in one of those swirling, tumbling, mesmerizing fluid-media filters. I actually have some of that stuff, acquired essentially for free from a retiring hobbyist a number of years ago. My granddaughters loved watching its hypnotic dance when they were younger...the only reason I bothered with it...but even they are outgrowing it lately. Yeah, yeah, I know...it's scientifically designed to give the bacteria a substrate on which to live, but at the same time it beats them senseless so that the weakest among them just give up, die and slough off. Only the strongest, most athletic and fittest bacteria can hang onto it. It's The Most Efficient biomedium because every individual bacterium on it is a superstar.
Guess what? When you have all the room that most sumps provide...you don't need ultra-super-duper efficiency. Sure, you can probably get away with a tiny, tiny amount of the stuff to provide enough surface area for enough bacteria to keep your tank heathy. Who does that? Everybody uses a ton of biomedia, way more than they "need". The majority of users of K1 buy and use the stuff because it's cool. If you doubt that, well...when is the last time you saw a home aquarium using K1 as a medium in an opaque container? Likely never. Gotta watch it wiggle and gyrate, don't ya know...
Here's my favourite biological medium:
Those charming little plastic gizmos are plastic shot wads, which are designed, manufactured and sold for use in home reloading setups to load your own shotgun ammunition. They are hollow little cylinders, closed off at one end and with a springy base to cushion the nice round shot and keep it nice and round when the gun goes off. And...they have a lot of surface area and grow bacteria just as well as the high-zoot techie stuff! A gallon of these things weighs a couple of ounces and costs 2 or 3 bucks. A mesh bag of them can be picked up with two fingers, quickly rinsed and shaken under running water if you feel you must "clean" your biomedia...which is almost never necessary if you have decent mechanical filtration...and returned to service within minutes. They work as submerged biomedia in your sump but they work amazingly well if you are old enough to still consider the use of an archaic wet-dry "trickle" filter, which is the way I use them. They aren't merely the Poor Man's Biomedium...they're more like the Homeless Vagrant's Biomedium, because they are crazy cheap, they last forever, they weight practically nothing and they work.
I still use and admire Poret foam for DIY sponge filters or pads, but these little wads put that stuff to shame in terms of cost-effectiveness as a pure biomedium. They aren't really comparable because Poret is also a wonderful mechanical medium whereas the wads require the use of a separate mechanical medium to prefilter the water passing over them.
When I moved to Manitoba from Ontario more than ten years ago, I brought several biologically-active Poret sponge filters with me, sealed in plastic buckets that weighed many pounds each. I also brought a couple of Rubbermaid Roughneck plastic garbage cans full of biologically-mature shotgun wads; they were so light that it was difficult to tell whether or not the cans were empty without looking inside of them. Try that with lava rock or ceramic rings or...well, with almost anything.
Of course, the proof is in the pudding; no way to say for sure if an idea works until it's tested long-term. I've been using shotgun wads for at least 35 years in my filters with complete satisfaction and no problems. The only problem: they're not cool. I can live with that.
I guess at some point in the ensuing years, Bioballs became old-hat and boring. The new successor to the throne was K1, but only if you had it in one of those swirling, tumbling, mesmerizing fluid-media filters. I actually have some of that stuff, acquired essentially for free from a retiring hobbyist a number of years ago. My granddaughters loved watching its hypnotic dance when they were younger...the only reason I bothered with it...but even they are outgrowing it lately. Yeah, yeah, I know...it's scientifically designed to give the bacteria a substrate on which to live, but at the same time it beats them senseless so that the weakest among them just give up, die and slough off. Only the strongest, most athletic and fittest bacteria can hang onto it. It's The Most Efficient biomedium because every individual bacterium on it is a superstar.
Guess what? When you have all the room that most sumps provide...you don't need ultra-super-duper efficiency. Sure, you can probably get away with a tiny, tiny amount of the stuff to provide enough surface area for enough bacteria to keep your tank heathy. Who does that? Everybody uses a ton of biomedia, way more than they "need". The majority of users of K1 buy and use the stuff because it's cool. If you doubt that, well...when is the last time you saw a home aquarium using K1 as a medium in an opaque container? Likely never. Gotta watch it wiggle and gyrate, don't ya know...
Here's my favourite biological medium:
Those charming little plastic gizmos are plastic shot wads, which are designed, manufactured and sold for use in home reloading setups to load your own shotgun ammunition. They are hollow little cylinders, closed off at one end and with a springy base to cushion the nice round shot and keep it nice and round when the gun goes off. And...they have a lot of surface area and grow bacteria just as well as the high-zoot techie stuff! A gallon of these things weighs a couple of ounces and costs 2 or 3 bucks. A mesh bag of them can be picked up with two fingers, quickly rinsed and shaken under running water if you feel you must "clean" your biomedia...which is almost never necessary if you have decent mechanical filtration...and returned to service within minutes. They work as submerged biomedia in your sump but they work amazingly well if you are old enough to still consider the use of an archaic wet-dry "trickle" filter, which is the way I use them. They aren't merely the Poor Man's Biomedium...they're more like the Homeless Vagrant's Biomedium, because they are crazy cheap, they last forever, they weight practically nothing and they work.
I still use and admire Poret foam for DIY sponge filters or pads, but these little wads put that stuff to shame in terms of cost-effectiveness as a pure biomedium. They aren't really comparable because Poret is also a wonderful mechanical medium whereas the wads require the use of a separate mechanical medium to prefilter the water passing over them.
When I moved to Manitoba from Ontario more than ten years ago, I brought several biologically-active Poret sponge filters with me, sealed in plastic buckets that weighed many pounds each. I also brought a couple of Rubbermaid Roughneck plastic garbage cans full of biologically-mature shotgun wads; they were so light that it was difficult to tell whether or not the cans were empty without looking inside of them. Try that with lava rock or ceramic rings or...well, with almost anything.
Of course, the proof is in the pudding; no way to say for sure if an idea works until it's tested long-term. I've been using shotgun wads for at least 35 years in my filters with complete satisfaction and no problems. The only problem: they're not cool. I can live with that.
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