Algae Scrubbers

There is supposedly some new great new design coming out in the future. I'm kind of waiting to see what turns out with that. I'm also interested in building and running a scrubber on my system. Seems like a real simple and natural way for nutrient export.

 

I haven't made an LED scrubber yet, the one I run uses T5HO and it will be replaced at some point in the future with an LED one, which I have on the drawing board currently.

Glad you made it back on here!

Say how many fish do you have in your system and what kind / how big? Like I said on RC PMs I think you're feeding a bit too much but I bet the fish and corals like that /DesktopModules/ActiveForums/themes/_default//emoticons/smile.gif

 

well, that is a lot of fish! So that puts your feeding amounts into perspective quite well.

The way to get the 'cube equivalent' for flake food is to put the amount you feed into some water and blend it up, then strain it, and put it into a cube. Either that or grind it up fine. So 1 cube of flake food is a whole lot more than you probably think it is (or maybe it's not!)

I'm thinking that the flake food, no matter how good it is, might be a big source of phosphates. Also the PE mysis shrimp (if that's what you're using) needs to be thoroughly rinsed. These things might be contributing to the hair algae.

Every once in a while, there is a DIY food seminar, in Des Moines we usually have one 2x a year and make a 'reef food' similar to Rod's Food. For me, it's great because I like to feed a lot and also have customers that like to feed a lot, so it's very cost effective, and you feed your fish and reef every day as well. What makes it great IMO with the scrubber is that the food circulates through until it is consumed on some level instead of getting filtered out, so there's no wasted food (that's if you use a scrubber only I guess). Anyways, off on a tangent.

But the bottom line is that excess nutrients are in the system long enough that the GFO and carbon can't take them out before the algae gets to them. So this is where the scrubber comes in nicely, you give the algae the place to grow and it out competes the algae in the DT. Depending on exact conditions, this can happen rather quickly, or it can drag out into a battle of sorts. The key to the latter is to have a very strong scrubber.

 

Any screen that is not fully vertical and in a 'waterfall' mode is considered a horizontal screen because of the tendency of the water to channel and flow through the screen and not through the algae evenly, thus it will seriously underperform when compared to a vertical waterfall scrubber. Just FYI. Horizontal screens generally need to be 4x as large and have 1.5x the light.

 

I don't believe in blowing detritus off of rock either. I've never done it and haven't had issues. then again I tend to go against the grain.

 

There's a long thread on RC that I kind of moderate. I wrote a 10-post summary on posts 2001-2010
http://www.reefcentral.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1977420

And look in srusso's signature for other pertinent posts. I'm updating the summary this week.

Then there's a whole site dedicated to scrubbers www.algaescrubber.net and anyone there would have been able to help troubleshoot.

You can have one thing 'off' and it will make a huge difference.