Every order of RAS-Right comes with the support of the people who developed it. Nova Q provides full technical support on all aspects of nitrification and biological water treatment, and our specialists stay alongside you, from the first conversation about your system through to routine maintenance dosing months later.

In practice, that means someone on our team who knows your system and is easy to reach when you need them, whether by phone, email or a quick message. It means a dosing plan set up around your volumes, salinity, feed and goals, and adjusted with you as your system changes. And it means bespoke training for your team, so your own people grow confident reading the water and managing the microbiome day to day.

However you get in touch, a member of our team will be happy to look after you. Once RAS-Right is in your system, you are in a safe pair of hands, from the first dose onwards.

Off-flavour control is the most advanced use of active microbiome management, a step beyond seeding a biofilter or holding nitrification steady. Where nitrification is a single pathway, breaking down geosmin and MIB draws on different modes of action and biological function within the consortium, working alongside good biofilter design and housekeeping to reduce off-flavour compounds at source.

Geosmin and MIB are produced by bacteria that build up in recirculated water and taint the flesh. People detect geosmin at very low levels, so even small amounts matter. The usual fix is depuration, holding fish in clean water for days or weeks while growth stalls. Active microbiome management addresses the biological side directly instead, breaking these compounds down and crowding out the organisms that make them, so fish keep feeding.

At Kuterra's land-based salmon farm in British Columbia, applied with the full method, RAS-Right grown in a Bioreactor Grow-Tank and dosed for off-flavour control, geosmin was brought below the 5 ng/L limit for acceptable flavour after 115 days and held there for months, with makeup water back below design levels.

“We're now getting Geosmin levels consistently below our maximum limit, coupled with only requiring design rates of makeup water, which is unprecedented in our site.”
— John Burton, Kuterra

Off-flavour is a whole-system matter, so we look at your biofilter, housekeeping and dosing together, and are straight about what active microbiome management can and cannot do for your site.

Managing geosmin or MIB? Talk to us about a Grow-Tank dosing plan for your system and off-flavour targets.

A transport tank, bag, haul truck or well boat is a closed system with no biofilter. From the moment fish are loaded they give off ammonia, and at transport densities the toxic fraction builds up quickly. It burns the gills, lowers immunity and leaves fish vulnerable on arrival, often well before oxygen runs short.

Dosing RAS-Right at loading puts bacteria that process ammonia straight into the water, in effect a working biofilter in the transport water itself, alongside a population that crowds out pathogens. No equipment is needed.

Independent trials at the College of Fisheries in Mangalore, India, measured how long fish lasted before losses set in. Fingerlings lasted seven times longer, spawn two and a half times longer, and treated fish on ordinary air outlasted untreated fish on pure oxygen by around a fifth. The lesson is a simple one: keeping the water right, not just adding oxygen, is what keeps fish alive in transit.

Whilst RAS-Right and RAS-Right-Marine are ready-to-use products they can also be grown and enhanced in easy-to-use BrewTus bioreactors, using RAS-Boost as a tailored bacteria product with macro and micronutrients, designed to enhance the functionality of all three stages of ammonia removal.

RAS-Boost ensures bacteria are fully functional in 7 to 10 days, and the bioreactor can then be kept running as a continuous source of RAS-Right bacteria, often acclimatized to any salinity.