I will share some information with you that I researched for another forum.
I have found out that the freshwater biospira previously marketed by Marineland has been discontinued since late 2006 when the company was bought out and merged with Tetra. The Marine refridgerated biospira is still available.
I have looked briefly at the patent information for this product which is using the same patent as Bio spira did.
Tetra Safestart Patent Information
The bacteria selection seems sound, however looking over the documents, they do not claim the actual product is live. They are using freeze dried organisms, which is fair enough, however when using freeze dried there will be a much longer period for the bacteria to re-establish themselves than if the bacteria were actually live. One thing concerning me here is that usually with freeze drying you reconstitute the bacteria in water or saline as you use the bacteria and the tetra product is already in liquid form, this concerns me with regard to the shelf life of the product. The documentaion does not seem to go into this part of the product. They use a denaturing process for the freezedrying which is similar to that used in vaccine production.
They claim that ammonia should not go above 3ppm in an aquarium setting and claim to reduce ammonia build up by 30%. In my opinion compared to the results I got with the original bio spira and when using Soll Bactinettes, these figures leave a lot to be desired. 3ppm is way to high in my opinion for ammonia to get to if you have fish in the aquarium.
The lady on another forum ran an experiment using a bank of 40l tanks, One fishless cycle, one seeded from mature tank, one with fish and normal planting, one silent cycled, one with tetra safestart and one with Nutrafin cycle. The fastest was the seeded tank, then fishless cycle (ammonia or fish food made no difference), Then silent cycle, Then one with fish and plants (this was control) The safestart tank ran ok for two weeks then ammonia raised and extra water changes needed, the nitrite spike was as seen without safestart and the cycle tank gave similar results. All tanks had a sand substrate and ran the same internal filter.
When I used bio-spira, there was no high nitrite spike, which the tetra product does seem to get. Nitrite is harmful to fish and the time taken for this part of the cycle is often the longest part. Due to there not being much in the way of nitrifying bacteria in the safestart and the ammonia concentration not reaching its regular high levels as it would if fishless cycling, I am guessing that this part of the process takes longer than it normally would. The one benefit I can glean from this is that your ammonia does not get to such a high concentration as to start killing off the ammonia processing bacteria you have established.
I can only conclude from this, that I would still opt for a refridgerated product if wanting to use a "live bacteria" and I would be very concerned about the claims that you can introduce fish at the same time as dosing the tank with Safestart.
I hope this gives you more information to help you make your decision, I do believe many aquarium company products are a waste of money that could be better spent elsewhere in the hobby. I would now only use the Soll bactinettes, the choice is yours.
