Mega-Powerful Nitrate and Phosphate Remover Replaces Skimmer, Refugium, part 1-4

[kcress]

Thanks.

I am surprised the turf is red/brown. The "turf" stuff I see on pilings and rocks is bright lime green.

I wonder if the slime and hair algaes are actually pulling some nutrients out that are helping the tank and being exported during the washings.

 

[SantaMonica]

There is green turf too. I should update my description of turf.

Algae pulls out Inorganic Nitrate, Inorganic Phosphate, ammonia, metals, and CO2.

Algae does not pull out Organics (food).

Is that what you mean?

 

[kcress]

What I was pondering was:

You put in a turf scrubber. It comes part and parcel with pulling it out and scrubbing it off, on a regular basis, each time removing slime and hair algae. Clearly, they are finding nutrients,(to them), of some sort that they must be extracting.

You see various tank parameters drop/improve.

I wonder how much drop and improvement can be attributed to regularly exporting the hair and the slime?

 

[SantaMonica]

Well on my tank, 100% is due to the scrubber because that's all I have for export. Also, on the LFS overload test that I'll be posting soon, it's mostly the scrubber. So it just depends on how much other filtration you have at the same time. I currently prefer all-algae filtration because it takes out all the Inorganic Nitrate and Inorganic Phosphate, but leaves in the food (Organics).

 

[SantaMonica]

.
"Sly" on the SWF site, who built a scrubber into a kitchen trash can (including a mechanical surge), gets the award for the biggest scrubber harvest so far on any site:

 

[GregAW]

Why couldn't you put some cleaners (Snails, etc.) in there and let them clean the algae off?

 

[i_limantara]

i believe that we can make fertilized on our flower with those algae too ^^
has anybody tried it....

 

[SantaMonica]

Snails would not be exporting nutrients. You need to get nutrients out of the tank.

Some people are indeed thinking of feed gardens with the algae.

 

[GregAW]

I wasn't thinking about transporting anything with the snails, I was thinking of them as to keeping the screen cleaned of the green algae growth. Green algae can also be used to make bio-fuels.

 

[SantaMonica]

If you mean keeping the green off the turf, you'd still want to get the green out of the tank.