Algae Scrubber Basics

[pskelton]

Thanks for all the advice. I have some persistent algae in my sand bed and on a couple rocks. I suspect it is from N and P leaching out. All parameters are good and all my tank inhabitants appear to be happy. I guess there is so much talk about green growth that I felt something had to be wrong with my scrubber. I will try cleaning one side of the screen with a brush but if that doesn't work I guess I am going just fine.

This forum has saved my tank

Thanks

 

[Floyd R Turbo]

Great!

What I meant about cleaning 1/2 of the screen was cleaning one half on both sides, rather than one side. Think of it like replacing 1/2 of the screen by way of scrubbing it well. Just wanted to clarify that...

 

[rysher]

what's the rule on running carbon with a scrubber?

 

[Floyd R Turbo]

No conflicts with carbon.

 

[rysher]

ok, thanks.
i'm having so many floating particles in my water that i think a carbon would help.
any thoughts?

 

[Floyd R Turbo]

Particles are food for corals, the only reason to remove them is for aesthetics. Carbon is not likely to remove them, you would want mechanical filtration. But either way, you're going to be removing coral food from the tank. Carbon is more for removing dissolved impurities, not particles.

 

[SPotter]

floyd....with the leds are you planning on using any optics???? I was looking at my lights last night and was thinking that I am losing a lot of light because the of spread. What do you think about putting 80 or 100 degree optics on them to kind of harness the spread a little?

 

[Floyd R Turbo]

If you're talking 3W LEDs then IMO you run into an issue with intensity and distribution. If you're close you want no lenses but then you get hotspots, so you move them away and now you spread the light out too much, so you put lenses on and end up re-focusing the light right where it was before, maybe a smidge less intense. 80-100 degree lenses yes, do they make those?

The LEDs I'm using are inherently 120 degree spread and all 1W so I plan on putting them 2" or so from the screen and based on other people's experiment with 1W LED fixtures this is perfect.

 

[SPotter]

I am probably about 4-5" away now because the 3w seemed too strong to be so close as it looked like I was getting burn marks. Since moving it back my growth has been great. Rapidled.com has 80 degree optics and know theres another online vendor that has 100's also. I might try putting the 80's on the led's that are on ends of my heat sink since a lot of the light from them is spilling over the screen and not really doing anything.

I will be following your test results closely because I am planning on building another ATS for my 280 that will be ready by the end of the year and my screen will be 20x15. My thought is to use use two 1" heat sinks that are 20" long. I would put 10 leds on each heat sink for a total of 20 per side. That would give me 120w's of led light.

 

[Jason.Wright]

So, seriously, does this really work? I have a mag 9.5 and very tempted to give this a try.

 

[Robert Patterso]

So, seriously, does this really work? I have a mag 9.5 and very tempted to give this a try.

Yep sure does. Best thing I ever did for my tank. No more gfo, fewer water changes. You won't regret it. Once you get it dialed in other than the weekly maintance it is pretty much hands free....

 

[SPotter]

I have taken down my gfo reactor, do water changes every 2-3 weeks now, feed twice as much as i used to and it only takes me 15 minutes to clean the screen weekly which the wife loves. And one more thing....Im only running my skimmer 12 hours a day now.

Steve

 

[mistaflicksta]

So, seriously, does this really work? I have a mag 9.5 and very tempted to give this a try.

Yes it works, and it works well

 

[mrbncal]

Yep sure does. Best thing I ever did for my tank. No more gfo, fewer water changes. You won't regret it. Once you get it dialed in other than the weekly maintance it is pretty much hands free....

+1 best thing I ever tried on my reef tank. :celeb3:

 

[redneckgearhead]

So, seriously, does this really work? I have a mag 9.5 and very tempted to give this a try.

Want a little proof? Do a search for hair algae and read some of the posts, It usually goes something like this........OP. "I am having a huge hair algae problem"....Response. "What are your parameters?"......OP. "I don't understand it my water parameters are perfect 0 ammonia 0 nitrites and 0 nitrates and 0 phosphates!"....someone usually chimes in and says yes because its all bound up in the HA!

All the ATS does is make those nutrients that are bound in that HA, easy to remove! Before and after shots of my tank are on this post if you want to take a look.

 

[pskelton]

So, seriously, does this really work? I have a mag 9.5 and very tempted to give this a try.

Jason, Sounds like you already have the expensive part, so you are about $20.00 away from having an algae scrubber. Looks to me that you have nothing to loose, so why not try?

My tank was a complete disaster with nitrate at 160 PPM (way over stocked, skimmer was a cheep piece of junk and kid dumped an entire container of food in tank). My skimmer was not cutting it, I really should have reduced my bioload and I was faced with needing to drop some serious $$ on a real skimmer. I was doing large water changes which were not making any difference and having a limited aquarium budget the water changes were starting to get expensive. I had the pump already (like you do) so I built a simple PVC overflow that ran down to a 5 gallon bucket where I installed the algae scrubber. In all I spent about 40 dollars for the overflow and scrubber parts. With in two weeks nitrate was down to 50. In 2-3 months I was down to 20 and after 6 months of running I am down to 0. My tank is over stocked by conventional rules and I have not done a water change since I installed the scrubber. The tank is healthy, easy to maintain, and cheep to keep running. Currently the algae scrubber is my only filtration.

 

[Jason.Wright]

Those are some great testimonials. I think I'll give this a shot. More to follow. 

 

[zhewitt04]

Week 2 growth

Week 2 growth

Here is my gowth after week 2

 

[zhewitt04]

Looking for input on the pics and am open to ideas to make it better

 

[SPotter]

how many lights are you using? it looks like your light is more focused to the left side of the screen than the right. I think your overall growth looks pretty good for two weeks.