Just to ensure I understand ...

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Just to ensure I understand your question correctly, you have an old reactor with "potentially dead" biomass at pH 4.5 - 5.5 and you want to use it to seed a new reactor? If not, please ignore the following...

Bacteria are incredibly resilient and will adapt to changes, provided they are made over a period of time. They generally just take a few hours to adapt to pH and osmotic pressure As long as the biomass you have is reasonably aerobic, it should make a reasonable seed sludge. As always with commissioning, you may have to feed it a bit slowly to start, but get it up to full load as soon as possible or the bugs may acclimatise to being underloaded.

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Thanks Jeremy. This site and whoever is mediating the questions hasn't an understanding of English. "How do I reseed my SBR that has potentially dead biomass. It has been running acidic for approx 4 years. I arrive to site march 2017 and have only received a pH probe. No other working waste water treatment plants on this remote island, 4000km from Australia in the middle of the pacific 

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Hi Chris, sounds like a lovely location. Perhaps I could visit and bring some seed sludge with me??

Is the sludge brown and with a "healthy" earthy smell, or black and sulphurous? If the latter, I'd suggest emptying it out and starting again, but no need to clean the tank scrupulously. As others have said, you can start a SBR from scratch, growing your own sludge from whatever bugs you have in the tank or in the sewage. Keep it aerobic and don't be afraid to decant the supernatant liquid when you need to - you have to get rid of the non-floc forming bugs and select for the floc-formers. Your effluent quality will be poor for several weeks, but from the sound of it the works has been non-functional for a while already.

I can't quite understand why the pH got so low in the first place. Did the tank turn completely anaerobic and begin acid fermentation? If not, and the acidic conditions occurred while the system was aerobic then you might need to investigate further. Could someone be dumping acid down the drain?

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