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

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.

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The trashcan looks cool! I hope it won't get too hot in there with that light closed in..

Here's a pic of my setup so far. I need to get my light closer; this, I know. As of this moment, though, growth is picking up slowly.

Quick question: Is it common to experience an algae bloom in the tank brought on by this setup? I'm getting a little cyano starting to rear it's ugly red head, and I don't want it to become a problem...

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Any changes in water chemistry can result in one or another algae getting a shift in its favor even if it may be temporary.

Sure be nice if you could spread that water a little bit more to get more screen coverage.
 
That trash can is great! It will likely heat the water a wee bit but that could be removed from the system elsewhere.
 
I'm in the process of rebuilding my sump from the ground up, and I will be taking the screen layout into consideration with the design..

I finally overcame my brainfart, and got the light about two inches from the screen, so we'll see how things go!
 
Morgadeth said:
I'm in the process of rebuilding my sump from the ground up, and I will be taking the screen layout into consideration with the design..

I finally overcame my brainfart, and got the light about two inches from the screen, so we'll see how things go!
Click to expand...

Morg, That's cool, take photos and post a thread. Start from the bottom and build. I'm new and need help. :)
 
Morg: That fellow heat tested the trash can for several hours and it never got warm. As for yours, yet getting the light almost touching the screen is important. Also, in your case, you need to get the water spread out more... it's just too small an area. Try positioning the top of the screen directly in the downflow. Since you are rebuilding, try to set up the screen with strong flow, and a wider light on both sides of the screen.

As for algae in the display, any growth on the screen can only take away from algae which can grow in the display. Now, you have not grown much on your screen (due to far lighting and narrow flow), so any changes in the display so far are probably from something else. But later on as your N and P get really low and your green and brown algae start disappearing from your display, you may think you are seeing more cyano since it now is not being shaded by the green and brown, and also, because cyano can extract N from the water at much lower N levels than other algae. However at some point the cyano will go away too. In my testing of how much I can feed my 90g before N starts showing up, I start noticing small spots of dark purple cyano as the N gets up to about a .2 reading. Then when I go back to normal feeding, the spots whither away.

kcress: I think it's just the big pic of the trashcan that's slowing you down (it's actually one big collage of small pics). Why don't we wait until the next page develops, and you can try it to see if it's back to normal.
 
Thanks GregAW. I appreciate the consideration. Try clicking "Next unread post" sometime. You can watch the whole thread jitter around for thirty seconds!
 
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