Scrubber vs. Hair Algae and other nasty stuff

[rleahaines]

What are the parameters to control and eliminate hair algae, dinos, other kinds of nuisance algae and so on if you have a tank with

2 small and one fairly large fish 1 damsel, 1 clown and a larger Engineer Goby.

Several corals - Xenias and almost bulletproof toadstool.

Tank has a new LED lighting system with plenty of light available for just about anything.

roughly 30 Gal in DT plus 10 additional in system.

A UAS - that can be adjusted for size of screen and lighting - one sided with 8 red and 2 blue LEDs

Water flow meets requirements as posted here.

Lots of live rock, some recently added.

Current UAS screen is 8 X 4 inches - one sided - getting fairly good but not great dark green growth.

I currently feed two pinches daily flake food and drop in some pellets for the goby - as it is a bottom feeder - or put some flake into his cave with a baster.

The amount of food is about 1 cube daily according to the calculator someone posted on this site.


I have hair algae that I manually remove - a good handfull every week.

I remove about the same from the scrubber each week as well.

I currently run the scrubber 18 hours on, 6 off each day.

The DT lights are on about 10 hours each day.

Nitrates at 0

Phosphate at .2 to .4

also running carbon and GFO.


I would really like to get this under control, eliminate the hair algae, get better scrubber growth and not have to run carbon and GFO.



Suggestions?

[SantaMonica]

The recently added LR, and the altered lighting on the current LR, have caused some die off which is darkening the scrubber. Leave the algae on the rocks, to help the scrubber get lighter. In about two months it should be stable.

[Floyd R Turbo]

Agreed. I think most people vastly overlook overall system stability. Algae takes advantage of instability. Also, not to throw a wrench in here, but I have heard about studies that have shown that bacterial colonies in systems with LED lighting (using the typical RB and CW mixtures) have significantly lower populations when compared to a system with HID or Fluorescent lighting. This is why you are seeing so many fixtures coming out nowadays with all kinds of other color LEDs thrown in the mix.

[rleahaines]

Bud,

Interesting about the LED colors. I have a mix of blue, cool white, warm white and some UV - I can see that the way the LED lighting works would not cover the range of HID or Fluorescent.

That said, the bacteria in the rocks that does the biological filtering doesn't get energy from the lights, but from the waste products of fish, corals and other critters.

so I don't quite know what it means or implies when you say the bactierial colonies have lower populations.

Do you have a link so I can read about it?

Rick

[Ace25]

I can see how that can be true. A lot of bacteria colonizes under 400-420nm and 660-700nm light, both spectrums are usually non existant in LED lights on displays, where as MH and T5 use UV extensively to get the colors (along with remote phosphors on the bulb). It isn't because the bacteria uses the light itself, but it uses the byproducts of other things which get created in those spectrums.

Not exactly scientific or an article, but this was scanned out of a textbook.
http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7257/7851958430_fe528bbf69_c.jpg

[Floyd R Turbo]

I can't recall where I heard or read about the bacterial populations thing. I'll have to dig for it.

[rleahaines]

I have royal blue LED's in the Display from Steve's LED's - in the range for algae growth. I think a lot of the LED fixtures out there are cool white with some actinic blue.

I built my own fixture from a kit from Steve's LED's - so I can adjust by changing the LED's if I want.

I am taking everything slowly here however. Aiming for system stability - and slowly reducing algae in the DT using the scrubber.