Ammonia as route cause to all nuisance in the hobby.

[Timfish]

Can’t these be mitigated by UV and activated carbon though?

Edit - I can imagine large amounts of green algae and the soup of bacteria food they release could make activated carbon useless in a very short period, however.

Both UV and Activated carbon will moderate DOC but not completely. From what I've been abel to gather GAC can remove ~70% - 90% but still leaves some. How this remainder skews the microbial stuff is a question. UV will break down DOC but how the conversion of refractory DOC into compounds more readily utilized by microbes is a concern, espacially as one of the issues corals have is uncontrolled proliferation of microbes in their holobiont.

 

[sixty_reefer]

I’ve made this sketch for another thread although I tough it was wise to share it here also, this is a basic thought on what is producing ammonia and what is using ammonia in our systems, in this sketch I believe that heterotrophic bacteria can only reduce ammonia by reducing organic matter and not directly, only chemotrophs and photosynthetic organisms would be able to use ammonia directly.

In the second sketch I got a hypothesis for two new systems one with the lights off and one with the lights on during cycling, I believe that to be true and cycles that started with lights on could in a way affect the effectiveness of the nitrogen cycle by reducing ammonia available to chemotrophs.