Non-Traumatic Pump and Cleansing System

[herring_fish]

I use a true dump bucket Algal Turf Scrubber (ATS). I have been using it since the early 90's and I like it. It works for me but it's not for everyone. I know that and I don't want to weigh the relative merits of an ATS compared to a skimmer here. We do that (ad nauseam) on other threads. I will however, talk about one of its benefits on my way to my questions.

As most of you know, algae in a properly designed ATS takes up nutrients. To over simplify it, the ATS does this as and after the food rots in the tank but the nutrients do stay at zero and that is what's important. This offers the possibility of leaving food suspended in the water column much longer.

This is great for liquid and powdered food but live food is killed by the same impellers that are in skimmers and that are used to get good water flow in the tank.

I was given a non-traumatic pump that is patented but never went into production. It basically works like a bubble lifter but it uses pillows of air that are the size of inches instead of millimeters.

I think that I can feed the dump bucket the 4 to 6 gallons of water it uses per minute, depending how I want to set it. When I first built it, I set it right on top of the tank but I felt that the splash was anemic. When I built my new tank, I lifted it one foot purely for cosmetic reasons.


This is a video when I was first setting it back up.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mRoKX8AjEbI

Now I am wondering, if I took out what I use for water flow in the tank and used the non-traumatic pump to feed the ATS I could let live food survive and stay suspended in the tank until it was consumed by the inhabitants in the tank. Of course this would include some settling to the bottom.

Now it's time to talk about relative merit. If I pumped a lot of live food, along with everything else that I put in, would things do well? Would lots of food make up for less water flow?

The dump bucket would provide only, say 6 gallons per minute. While there is lots of local turbulence (2 gallons per dump), under the bucket, the flow from that end to the over flow at the other end would not be much.

The ATS can handle a very high amount of feeding and live food has a little bit of motility to stubble into the feeders but would that amount of flow be enough to provide a healthy environment?

 

[aninjaatemyshoe]

What kind of live food are we talking about here? Are you trying to keep specific food species alive? What do you plan to be feeding in this tank (corals, fish, inverts)? How beneficial this method would be will depend on the answers to these questions.

 

[herring_fish]

I want to grow rotifers and brine shrimp for starters. Reef Bugs don't suffer from prop damage but I want to grow them as well, as and experiment. My sponges seem to like it and it drops the nutrients like adding vodka only safer. I would like to grow anything that I can but I am thinking that if there was a lot introduced into the tank everything would do well.

I put in mostly powdered food now and get good growth from filter feeders like feathers and my sponges do well. I am just starting out with this new set up though I have been in the hobby for a long time.

I want to have a mixed reef set up with fish SPS, LPS and non-photosynthetic corals. What I can really do is a question.

I have a 130 gallon tank with a 55 gallon that is in the garage. The 55 is full of coral rubble only. I only feed 8 gallons to and from it per day via a peristaltic pump because it is too good at consuming the nutrients. My ATS stopped growing algae when I brought it on line. Not a bad problem to have. I find that I can put almost any amount of food in the tank without and issue, as long as I build up to it slowly.

These are not very specific answers but I'm not sure what I want to do yet. I know that SPS need lots of flow. I could put them close to the water dump. I am reading lately that they like a lot more food than we use to think.

 

[aninjaatemyshoe]

Sounds like a really interesting setup. I would definitely like to know how this works out for you.

I don't think you'll be very successful growing things like rotifers or brine shrimp within your display tank. Ultimately, with any closed system like this, you'll end up with some dominant species that will devour or out-compete other species. However, a setup like this might allow live food to survive until it is eventually eaten by something.

The approach you're taking is definitely a holistic one, in that you're basically trying to setup a stable, closed ecosystem with as little interference (for good or bad) from traditional equipment as possible. While I can appreciate this approach from its intent, I think you're going to have a few issues:
-You don't have much in place to save your system if you have a sudden nutrient spike.
-The flow in your tank may very well not be adequate for many corals.
-You're entirely depending upon your dump bucket to provide flow. If it stops, your tank goes stagnant.
-The flow in your tank will not be laminar, so many non-photo corals will likely be unsupportable.

 

[herring_fish]

Oh I plan to grow the plankton separately and add it to the tank through the line that goes back to the tank from the garage. They say that fish alone will eat everything that might grow in the tank.

I never get nutrient spikes if I don't change things radically. If I did, I guess that I would just do a water change. The dump bucket is about 15 years old and has never stopped working. Now the pump that feeds it is another story. If the pump stopped I would just have to replace it. Perhaps I would just have to pull a stander power head or sump pump off of the shelf and I would be back in business. If a seam split, the algae screen would keep working long enough to get it repaired or to build a new one. I once pull the bucket off line to make some changes. I just put the screen in the top of the tank and it work fine. It looked pretty ugly but it was just fine.

Also, if the pump stopped, I could just use the back up flow generating pump. It would chop up the plankton that is in the tank until I could get the non-traumatic pump back on line.

This brings me back to the main issue. Would there be enough flow in the tank to carry off waste and allow adequate respiration? On the feeding side, water normally brings food to the polyps. Could a higher food concentration alone bring enough food to that same polyp?

I don't know if I have enough guts to make that leap of faith