Waterfall Turf Algea Filter: CHEAP and EASY to build

[aqua180]

a flatbed ats works the best, takes up more room and makes a little more noise when the surge bucket fills and dumps, but with my years of using ats's these grow the turf quickly and are easy to harvest every week ,which is a must.

 

[SantaMonica]

Another difference is that some of the flatbeds had tight lids, which stopped evaporation. That could be useful or not. I like the evaporation; along with the fans I added on top of the tank and sump, they have caused my chiller to stop turnning on at all.

I'm currently designing a high $ acrylic low-profile unit for my 90 that will sit on my sump. It will be enclosed so there will be no evaporation, unless I cut a hole and use a fan. It also with have very powerful T5HO strips just 1.5" from the screen, providing over three times the power compared to the bulb used in my sample bucket.

 

[SantaMonica]

Here is the screen from the person who bought pre-grown turf from Inland Aquatics, after growing on the tank for one week, and then after cleaning:

 

[salty joe]

<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=13257845#post13257845 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by SantaMonica
I'm currently designing a high $ acrylic low-profile unit for my 90 that will sit on my sump. It will be enclosed so there will be no evaporation, unless I cut a hole and use a fan. It also with have very powerful T5HO strips just 1.5" from the screen, providing over three times the power compared to the bulb used in my sample bucket.

But if there is a barrier between the algae and the light, a lot of the light will be blocked by algae and calcium carbonate buildup on the plastic or glass.

 

[SantaMonica]

No, amazingly the water does not cause much salt spray when the flow is set correctly. In my bucket now, when I reach down and feel the walls (even right near the screen), there is almost nothing there. In the new acrylic one, yes there will be some since it will be very close, but the lights are much much closer to make up for it, plus, they are three times the power. Besides, any salt spray that does build can be washed off by just plugging the drain of the box so the water fills to the top. I'll have pics to show just how much it happens.

 

[Tang Salad]

<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=13257137#post13257137 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by SantaMonica
For those that don't already know, you can do two things when Vitz posts:

1) Click "Report this post to a moderator" at the end of the post, on the right.

2) Click on the "My RC" button at the top of your screen, then click "Edit Ignore List", type Vitz in the empty box, and click Update List.

That's extremely uncalled for. Vitz is simply offering very good, accurate, and backed-up criticsm of this method which has been around for decades.

If you make very bold claims, you should be ready for some bold criticism.

 

[vitz]

the ONLY initial criticism i had was with santa claiming that a scrubber replaces a skimmer+fuge+everything else, when it was plainly obvious that he has VERY little practical experience, and absolutely NO hard data to back up his statements.

i even offered a complement on the diy part of his post, and explained the root of my critique as simply and plainly as possible, as others did

all we got back in return was a complete refusal to engage in the attempt to back up his outlandish claim with hard data, and cries of 'ad hominem!', which is pretty hypocritical given his post about what to do when i post to this bb, lol

he's also shown his ignorance on what the various filter/maintenance systems do, how they do it, and how the ecology of a tank works, along with all of the possibly thousands of variables involved regarding what actually is happening with all of the various biological and chemical processes going on in any closed or open system

having been in this hobby since '76-77, with experience in retail since '77, 3-4 years of commercial polyaquaculture, currently the main husbandry tech for one of the largest importer/wholesalers in the country,and being quite well read/experienced in all of the various tank keeping methods, i've seen too many noobs get sucked into this type of 'hype' advice, only to see them fail horribly when something happens that the original poster wasn't even aware was capable of occuring, that the noob then has NO knowledge about how to fix

NO filtration method replaces any other-they are ALL DIFFERENT, and all do an incomplete job-so how could ONE method replace three ? seems to me that a skimmer/fuge/dsb has many more bases covered than an algae scrubber

but then again, i have a very good idea what each one does and how, and what the shortcomings are for each

with only 2 yrs in the hobby (not all of it actually maintaining the tank himself, heh) it's IMPOSSIBLE for that initial statement to be made by santa, and be remotely backed up, let alone correct

and i'm still waiting to see a pic of a mature healthy sps tank that uses only a turf scrubber-no wc's, skimmer, sand bed, fuge, or anything else, btw

some people just can't accept that in spite of their enthusiasm, they're simply wrong-which i don't have an issue with-i have a serious issue with the enthusiam when it's presented as recommended practice and fact for unsuspecting noobs to follow

 

[Michael]

i know you have told me before, on another site that is, sorry to sound ignorant, perhaps its me santa, why wont the algae get into the dt and cause problems there, i did try to look for the link earlier, this was my main concern, please refresh my mind on this santa, many thanks again

 

[aqua180]

man ,you fokes are to uptight lol
its only a opinion. <"))))>{

 

[herring_fish]

COOLER lights and COOLER heads?

COOLER lights and COOLER heads?

I am a big fan of the T5s. I have four of them on my horizontal dump bucket. They’re cool and bright so I can go without anything between the lamps and the water line. I may go back to my evaporative unit with a halogen lamp if it is needed but for that last few years of operation, I didn’t need the cooling because the living room was cool and the air interaction with the splash was enough.

I will cut and bent some thin clear plastic to cover the socket areas only. This will cut down on the salt build up, at the connection, from air born partials. I know that salt is left behind after evaporation but there are still some super small droplets of salt water that float around. Of course there is the occasional accidental splash.

Anyway, I still expect to take the lights out and cleaning everything about every one or two years.

You know, some people will never be convinced that ATSs are “all that”. My scrubber has worked great for me, for many years. That’s all that is important to me.

I am setting up a fuge for my new tank now so I see it’s value but I didn’t have room for one in my very small tank cabinet in my living room. I had a scrubber, a plenum in the bottom of tank and a quarter sock of carbon that I dropped in the dump bucket. That’s it, that’s all. I hardly ever changed much water and my turbo grazers all starved to death.

On the other hand, skimmers work too. Mine is in the garage but it worked.

 

[SantaMonica]

Michael: You already have spores of algae in your tank right now as you read this, including green hair, green slime, and red/brown turf algae. But without enough light (and in the case of turf, flow and air), they will not grow. Algae grows first where it has the most light. That's the first part of how a screen works: It's just more light, out of the tank. The second part of a screen's operation is the turbulent flow across the screen; this brings many more nutrients in contact with the screen than just regular tank flow does. Lastly, if you are doing a vertical screen with a pump, and you put a wavemaker timer on the pump (on, off, on, off), then the "off" time will simulate the time between real waves in the ocean, which breaks up the "boundary layer" around the algae. This boundary layer slows down the passage of nutrients from the water to the algae. This last step (pulsing the water) is very important if you are going to want the true stiff red/brown turf algae, since real turf lives out-of-the-water (on rocks, pylons, etc).

Herring: Yes I was almost going to use 100W halides, but found a nice small 2-bulb 24" T5HO unit from Current. Most important was that it was thin, 1.5", since it will be on both sides of the acrylic. Looks like final measurements will be about 6" high, 6" deep, and 24" wide.

 

[Mike O'Brien]

In a classic case of "not doing research", some anti-turf folks on another site have ended up helping out the turf scene. They are constantly accusing pro-turf or pro-algae folks, and especially anti-skimmer folks, of not having research. So they post a research video from the College of Marine Science (U of S. FL, St. Petersburg) on that site, which is supposed to prove with research that algae, especially turf, kills corals. Yes. Then they follow it up with "So I guess you didn't watch the video, right?"

Quote:
ABSTRACT
Declines in coral cover are generally associated with increases in the abundance of fleshy algae. In many cases, it remains unclear whether algae are responsible, directly or indirectly, for coral death or whether they simply settle on dead coral surfaces. Here, we show that algae can indirectly cause coral mortality by enhancing microbial activity via the release of dissolved compounds. When coral and algae were placed in chambers together but separated by a 0.02 ìm filter, corals suffered 100% mortality. With the addition of the broad-spectrum antibiotic ampicillin, mortality was completely prevented. Physiological measurements showed complementary patterns of increasing coral stress with proximity to algae. Our results suggest that as human impacts increase and algae become more abundant on reefs a positive feedback loop may be created whereby compounds released by algae enhance microbial activity on live coral surfaces causing mortality of corals and further algal growth.

Quote:
corals died when placed adjacent to macroalgae, even when separated by a 0.02 µm membrane that was impermeable to viruses and microbes, but not dissolved compounds like DOC. The algae increased microbial growth on the coral, which in turn caused hypoxia and presumably the coral mortality. Coral mortality did not occur in this experiment when antibiotics were added [77]. These results suggest that algal-derived DOC may be a primary driver of coral-microbial interactions. In addition, algae-associated microbial communities harbor pathogens that cause coral disease [78].


Who watched it and who didn't ??

This HELPS the turf scene ????

 

[SantaMonica]

I wasn't pointing to or speaking of that. I was speaking of this:

http://www.marine.usf.edu/videos/2007-01-26.wmv

23:30 "Bulk DOC does not correlate with coral decline; higher DOC areas have healthier corals; lower DOC areas have weaker corals. The opposite of what we predicted".

24:40 "The DOC to DIN ratio's are higher on healthy reefs, and lower on less-healthy reefs".

25:45 "Microbial numbers are elevated with a lower DOC to DIN ratio" (!)

34:00 "Christmas Island, with the really low DOC, has the highest pathogens, while Kingman Island, with the highest DOC, has the lowest pathogens."

37:00 "On Kingman Island you have high hard-coral coverage and the lowest disease [and highest DOC]. That's weird! What you should find is that as hard-coral coverage reduces, it should be harder for the pathogens to find hosts, so you should see a pathogen decrease. But we're not seeing that, which means there is something else going on."

49:20 "The DOC definitely always goes down, in the really bad coral areas".

52:39 "You can actually put the corals where the nutrients are really high, and the corals are not dying; in some cases they tend to grow better, which is also true in our [???].

 

[SantaMonica]

Here's a rather ingenious screen-in-a-trashcan that someone just built. This type of design will eliminate evaporation (and cooling), if that's what you want. One thing I might change would be the distance of the bulb to the screen; it should be so close that it almost touches it. In all the builds I've seen so far, the ones that have slow growth always have the bulb too far away, or too small a wattage.

 

[SantaMonica]

Here is an example of a screen that I wish were done better. He's using the skimmer output and dropping it right down on the screen at an angle, so that most of it goes through the screen. I'd rather see the water spread out across the screen. Also, the light is too far away. Thus, he got very little growth in the first seven days:

 

[CaptiveReef]

Turf Algae Filter

Turf Algae Filter

Thanks, good to hear back from you. Feel free to add anything to the thread if you want, too.

Bryan




quote:
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CaptiveReef wrote on 09/01/2008 07:00 PM:

quote:
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SantaMonica wrote on 08/02/2008 05:30 AM:
Hi,

I was reading an older post of yours about skimmerless filtering. Could take a look at a turf filter post I made, and post your comments on it if you care to? It is here:

http://www.reefcentral.com/forums/s...76#post12931276

Regards,
Bryan

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Hello Bryan,
I went to the begining of this thread and looked at the design pics as well as the actual working prototype pics. It is a great design! you are getting more light than a horizontal turf unit, as well as more contact area.
If you are going skimmerless then use a good carbon with water changes, to maintain clear water. Algae filters do work, but they will in time yellow the water.
These days everybody is using algae filters,(Eco-Systems) Refugiums, but they are using protein skimmers with them. I find Turf, (algae filters) are excellent for removing Phosphates, but not effective in removing proteins, fish waste, and most important Terpens, ( which is the corals chemical defense). I just helped one of my friends who has 180 gal reef with SPS, LPS, Leathers, he is using a refugium/Eco-System filter with a skimmer. He didn't notice the skimmer's 2 venturi's clog up and stop working. He lost about $500.00 in corals, the water quality went out the window. The Algae filter could not handle the Terpen buildup in the tank, 1st to go were the SPS, LPS, the leathers were able to handle the nutrient rich water conditions.
SPS corals are found in fast moving water with very little nutrient levels due to strong currents.
Your design is excellent, use it with a protein skimmer and reef carbon, and you will have an efficient complete filter.

Thanks, Greg CaptiveReef

 

[SantaMonica]

Good to have accounts from both sides. I've never used the Eco System mud before, nor researched it, so I can't really comment on how the mud might have affected the corals. But maybe the sudden change in water conditions shocked the corals.

 

[piercho]

For sloped growing surfaces, you can use the backside of fired ceramic tile or sanded acrylic for a growing surface. The water will spread out and flow over the surface rather than through it. If you insist on using the unnecessary (IMO/IME) screen, put the screen over a sheet of acrylic. Turfs attach to even the slickest surfaces. The thing is you don't want to completely remove the algae when you scrape, so glass or slick plastic is not appropriate. A porous (the backside of a fired tile) or rough (sanded acrylic) surface allows tiny remnants of the algae to not be scrapped away.

 

[rickb]

Santa monica, do you know if anyone is looking at optimal submerged/aerated timesfor turf algae? I'm confused if having it submerged all the time or the timed spraybar is better. Any data in this regard?

 

[SantaMonica]

Rick, the only data I know of is Adey patent, which recommends (I believe) a minimum of 8 seconds. I however have been playing around with the wave timer, from 15 to 120 seconds, and I don't see a difference in growth. I keep it now at 30 seconds; seems to be enough time for the algae to rid most of the water.