Does anyone know if there is such a thing as a brackish filter aid? When I clean my filters, I always like to put a bit of Waterlife's Bacterlife into the tank just incase I've over-cleaned. Just as a precaution really. But I don't know whether it's any use when the tank's brackish? Or if there's a marine product I should use instead? Or even a brackish one?
Explain what you mean by over clean. How are you cleaning it? I'm not familiar with the product, but if it's like most bacteria in a bottle, it's dead bacteria, which would just add ammonia to the tank.
The filter media should just be rinsed with tank water, and occasionally the impeller will need cleaning.
It's a bacteria culture I believe. It's always done a great job for me. I reckon that's because I live right next to the place they make it so I buy it straight from their own shop, which means it's not been siting in the back of a lorry getting carted around for goodness knows how long! It's one of the types that promises not to add any ammonia, and it doesn't which is great.
I clean out the filter sponges in tank water, not sure how often! Just whenever the filter flow reduces a touch. But I always worry that I'm going to deplete too much of the filter bacteria whilst I'm at it, so I add Bacterlife to the sponges before they go back in.
I wouldn't worry about it or add anything. We clean our filters regularly and have yet to have any decrease in water quality afterwards.
It is absurd to talk of one animal being higher than another. We consider those, when the cerebral structure/intellectual faculties most developed, as highest. A bee doubtless would when the instincts were.
Charles Darwin
Nitrification bacteria can live anywhere in the tank, but in well-set and well-maintained filters, that is the most favorable location, so that is where they live. In a well-set filter, the bacteria are protected from silting up my mechanical filters upstream of the biological filters - this prevents the nitrification bacteria from being smothered by the physical waste particles covering them up. If the same sponges serve both as mechanical and biological filtration, they should be rinsed often enough to avoid any significant drop in flow.
If that last is the case for your filter, you might have a better margin of safety if you rinsed the filter on a fixed schedule - such as weekly, or every other week - to protect the biofilter bacteria. Allowing biofilters to slow down much has risks of reduced oxygenation and possible silt suffocation. In silt suffocation the bacteria migrate onto the debris, so may get rinsed away at cleaning.
Then you should have no need to add bacteria anyway. Properly set and maintained tanks require no supplemental bacteria for indefinite operations - decades at least if not forever.
