Love it. Thanks tons for posting
Up for the best science test of the week? Let's do a digestion test of the sand to see if tap rinsing kills it.
The more that run this test, the more data plots we have to riff from but at least someone do this test... it's the only way we'll know for sure.
Because this test measures ammonia digestion, we are making a 1 ppm water system quick n fast by dosing a bare bottom five gallon tank using ammonium chloride, a high quality non API ammonia kit (mr seneye, from the syeneye ammonia monitor thread pls join up here) or use salifert or Red Sea. We need to see ammonia at 1 ppm go down from rinsed materials in saltwater vs/rinsed in tap.
an oversized sponge filter meant for say forty gallons or better, for biomodeling my claim, cycled, is ideal. That rascal can digest 1 ppm in 24 hrs...heavy bubbled, in five gallons. Might could do six ppm heh, 1 for my test is good as we don't have all yr to get data.
Once someone has any small test Home Depot bucket bubbling with a sponge filter cycled which is huge for your volume, begin your baseline:
Dose water to exactly one ppm.
Measure in 24 hours...as soon as system can oxidize that to zero *in 24 hrs* this test is ready.
Change the water back out to fresh salt water, reset from prior test back to clean.
Rinse that sponge filter out decently with tap, then put it back, set system back to one ppm using AC/quality test.
Collect 24 hour results AND 48 hr results and then results on the fourth day after that single redose back to one ppm... post a three reading ammonia level retake plot for the tap rinsed sponge filter spanning 24/48 and four days
Now even if I'm in complete attribution error, we have zero tank losses and I've been having people flip their beds like pancakes
so by holding course we're basically guaranteed to get another eleven pages without loss even with the real variable at work that we don't know about.
The truth is, some bacteria are removed by any form of stasis change... rinse event vs biota used to gentle bubble current means some ride down the drain but some are housed in biofilm, till you use bleach. That regrowth is my forty eight hour and four day readings above.
We could wash our raw chicken contact surfaces dishes and prep saws in cool tap, and be safe, if tap was a good short term contact sterilizer and film debrider
They're incidental, the portion of bac we kill. If someone is running a sandbed only system, with a massive bioload above it, perhaps we go differently but by rule we show here that res publica has TOO MUCH extra surface area vs too little, so hammering some bacteria out pales in comparison to the benefit of flushing out literal rotted waste.
We know that live rocks takeover from sand losses, we see that in bare bottom tank threads where the keeper just yanks the bed.
If one person runs my test and finds a total loss of filtration ability by day four from a brief tap rinse, that's not the same as ten people reporting it. Out of ten thousand views on this thread, for sure at least ten readers already have the hardware and bio ware for this test.
That will be the single most important test to determine microbiological fact about rinse impacts.
