Mega-Powerful Nitrate and Phosphate Remover Replaces Skimmer, Refugium, part 1-4
- Thread starter SantaMonica
- Start date
well, i think i have to upgrade my lights to 26w instead of the 23's. its been 10 days and i don't have any black stuff or much green stuff growing other than the hair algae i placed on the screen to seed it. its quite brown but not thick. Should I clean the screen anyways or wait for black stuff?
Cleaned it today for the first time. it was starting to get something that was faint red colored growing in and the hair algae was starting to get thicker so I cleaned it off. just took a knife and scraped it under tap water. Looking forward to the next week now
Nutrients vs. Nutrition
The word "nutrient" and "nutrition" are commonly mixed up when talking about reefs. Skimmers (in this case, air bubbles) only remove nutrition, which is fine if all you have is fish, but skimmers/bubbles have no affect on nutrients. "Nutrients" are Inorganic Nitrate, Inorganic (Ortho) Phosphate, Ammonia, Ammonium, and Nitrite. Matter of fact, if you took a fresh batch of newly made saltwater and put a skimmer in it, then added pure nutrients, the skimmer would not have any skimmate at all. Algae, however, would start growing out of control. If, however, you added nutrition (phyto, plankton, ground up flakes, etc) to that same batch of saltwater, the skimmer would go crazy and remove it all.
The word "nutrient" and "nutrition" are commonly mixed up when talking about reefs. Skimmers (in this case, air bubbles) only remove nutrition, which is fine if all you have is fish, but skimmers/bubbles have no affect on nutrients. "Nutrients" are Inorganic Nitrate, Inorganic (Ortho) Phosphate, Ammonia, Ammonium, and Nitrite. Matter of fact, if you took a fresh batch of newly made saltwater and put a skimmer in it, then added pure nutrients, the skimmer would not have any skimmate at all. Algae, however, would start growing out of control. If, however, you added nutrition (phyto, plankton, ground up flakes, etc) to that same batch of saltwater, the skimmer would go crazy and remove it all.
I had an algae scrubber on my tank and I did not like it, a lot of hassle plus a nutrient trap and cyano farm. I took it out and put some chaeto in instead and my tank is doing much better.
It can be a bit of extra work, but the other statements aren't necessarily true of a properly maintained scrubber.
It is a good concept that santa monica has, it just was not practical for me. this is from my experience.
I had plenty of GHA in my tank while I had the scrubber running, and now I don't. the only change in the system was the scubber's replacement by chaeto. I had an urchin and a foxface both battling the GHA in the display both with and without the scrubber. now I have none.
the chaeto is more flexible in terms of nutrient export as it's surface area can increase to the confines of the fuge, whilst the screen is limited by its size. my screen was 8" x 5" single sided, so it should have been able to handle a 20 gallon system.
There are various phases the tank will go through, which is why there is a resurgence of algae in the meantime (I noted something similar when using GFO, which tapered off after a while). GHA is far more efficient in terms of both assimilation as well as the level of nutrients in which it can thrive. A scrubber will thrive and continue to filter long after Chaetomorpha stops growing. It requires much more surface area of Chaetomorpha to get the same job done. FWIW, that screen size is suitable for ~40 gallons if both sides are lighted, which is a conservative estimate.
I agree, however, that scrubbers aren't for everyone. It is just disheartening when things aren't portrayed clearly about scrubbers, since the previous post was a bit misleading without the clarification you just provided. They are a viable filtration method capable of removing very, very significant quantities of dissolved nutrients very quickly. In my experience, not even bacterial additives can compare in that regard. Such additives can theoretically get nutrients lower overall, though, and do so cheaper (considering the energy costs and space for a scrubber). I'm just not a fan of the other unknowns associated with organic carbon dosing.
This is why I don't recommend single sided. Single-sided scrubbers are hardly ever set up correctly, and even when they are, the algae islands will restrict flow. Cyano on the screen is from lack of flow. And that is what happened here.
