Kaldnes Media Experiment

I'm just wondering how long did it take your K1 to brown up? I've built a small reactor just playing around which has been running for about 30 days now and still looks as white as the day I started it. I have 1 cube foot of media for building a bucket style reactor for a future grow out system build

Increasing the churning activity may help.  One thing that can happen is that media can become laden with organic matter.  Extra churning helps prevent this.  Focusing on organic removal within the system also helps (which is what we do).  You can also have a canister filter prior to the media. 
 
Since we started sterilizing our systems between broods, this issue has disappeared on our fry systems.  Our brood stock systems don't get as much food dumped in so the media goes much longer before this happens.
 
Dan

My media never got brown like I've seen in other systems. 
 
Dan, You're saying that if the media becomes laden with too much organic matter it will float? It still looks pretty white to me. Also, these are in my broodstock systems so I don't/can't really shut them down like I do with larval rearing tanks.
 
Return water passes through a filter sock, a felt pad, a poly-bio filter pad, and then into a bucket before getting to the section where the reactor is located.
 
Update- I switched air pumps on one of them and it's rolling now!

http://www.fishtalpropagations.com/#!home/mainPage
"Making captive breeding easier."

Anyone running pellets or dosing carbon with their kaldness?
 
I dose vodka heavily as my main method of nitrate control. I would love to get rid of most of my liverock once my k1 is cycled but I need to figure this out. I've always thought the bacteria lived on liverock and was then leached out into the water to be skimmed off.

First, thanks for everyone's feedback on this media. After checking it out on the internet i believe in this filtration method.
The prospect of getting rid of my live rock makes me cackle maniacally. I hate everything about it, the flow it requieres, the detritus buildup underneath, space ect ect.
Yet at the same time i feel guilt as coming from a reefing background everyone shoves down your throat that a saltwater tank without liverock is like a car without wheels. Funny stuff
 
Heres my take on it . It was hard to find in canada so I got one cubic pound of a knock off called MaxBio from a koi pond store for 60$. It looks the same. I mean its just plastic right ?

 

 
My sump consist of 2 30 gallons connected together by a 1.5" pipe. I put a 2.5gallon thrash can with holes at the exit of that pipe. Bubbles are generated by the standpipe on its own at the source. I might add an air stone later if needed

 

 
In the other sump I'm going to use an old zeovit reactor powered by a maxijet 1200 and an air stone

 

A new update on my K1 reactors... They have been kinda working over the last several months. One has been working better than the other. By "working" I mean the media is tumbling. 
Tonight while feeding I noticed the airstone in the less active reactor has fallen off the airline and is working a LOT better. We had a big storm here today and the power went on and off several times, I'm running on generator power at the moment. Not sure if that had anything to do with the airstone coming off or if it was just a coincidence. 
End result is my reactor seems to work a lot better without an airstone. I'll remove the other one tomorrow and see what happens.

http://www.fishtalpropagations.com/#!home/mainPage
"Making captive breeding easier."

any one have an update on their K1?

works great for me
I use a pondmaster ap-20 air pump to churn both growout and broodstock. Gives me a rolling boil in both.
I sold all my liverock for a couple hundreds bucks and that felt good

Wow. So you don't use live rock anymore. What exactly is in your sump?

On my 120g growout: a filter sock and a 5 gallon bucket filled 2/3 with k1 media
broodstock is a mix of k1/algea scrubber/biocubes/skimmer
 
It's only been 3 month for me but i feel confident everything i throw in the tank gets converted to nitrates quickly. 

Thanks for the info. Time for me to try this out. I just ordered 2 cu ft for my broodstock and grow out systems.

So mine is on the way. Can I just add it into a compartment in my current sump or is there something speial I need to do? Thanks

anybody noticing a huge difference in the off brand knock offs, verses the K1 Kaldness actually put out by Petair Aquatic Ecosystems... 
 
Just from reading through it seems like the knock offs are keeping up with the K1 .... any results to back that assumption up? 
 

So my K1 just got delivered. Anything special I need to do or can I just add it to an existing sump and aerate?