gguertin 180 l4 waterfall scrubber

[gguertin145]

Traveling for work but took a few pictures and wanted to start a thread. I have a 180 mixed reef with only 3 fish to start getting ready to add more but im already seeing algae in my display. Tank has been running for 40 days or so. Getting good growth on the scrubber with full flow out of the rio pump and 9 hours of straight light overnight. Please tell me any other info you need.

[SantaMonica]

Phosphate is going from the rocks to the scrubber.

[gguertin145]

So how do i get rid of the algae on the rocks then? Am i doing something wrong should i up my lights clean more often or less often?

[SantaMonica]

It will go away.

[Floyd R Turbo]

Make sure that you clean the slot every week no matter what, and then scrub the top inch of the screen until there is no algae at all on it. This will keep the flow as good as it can me.

Is that relatively new rock, or was it transferred from an existing system? I can't recall what you told me.

[sabbath]

Make sure that you clean the slot every week no matter what, and then scrub the top inch of the screen until there is no algae at all on it. This will keep the flow as good as it can me.

Is that relatively new rock, or was it transferred from an existing system? I can't recall what you told me.

His rock was acid bathed after a really bad cyano outbreak.

[gguertin145]

Just curious how to know if the algae is leaching out of the rock or from somewhere else. If this is true it is what I would hope and the scrubber should take care of this but here are my concerns

1. I dried my rock out
2. I bleached and acid bathed the rock


Bud I have cleaned the pipe every week with the harvest and use the toothbrush to clean the top of the screen.

[SantaMonica]

Drying and bleaching and acid does not do anything; it just kills the organism in and on the rock. All the carbon and phosphate is still in the rock, it's just dead. As the scrubber grows, the phosphate will go from the rock to to the water, and this will grow algae again on the rock until the phosphate is out of the rock.

It would have been quicker to just use a scrubber first, without having to dry and bleach and acid the rock. This way you also get to keep all the life/pods/worms etc in the rock, which are all now dead.

[Floyd R Turbo]

I'm calling BS on that. That is such a load of bunk. Countless people have acid bathed rocks to get them back to fully dead rock. I'm talking about soaking in Muriatic Acid (Hydrochloric, from a pool supply store). Sometimes it takes many treatments and powerwashing. Sometimes it takes an additional soak in vinegar and more powerwashing, etc. But throwing out a blanket statement that it doesn't do anything is just ludicrous.

Anyone who has watched enough Law & Order can tell you that you can dissolve a human body, bones and all, in hydrochloric acid. I think it can easily dissolve organisms on rock. In fact, if you let it soak long enough, it will actually start to dissolve the rock, depending on what type it is. So you are way, way off here.

Putting a scrubber on the tank full of nasty rock would take months, maybe even a year or longer, to leech all the nutrients out. Yes you destroy all life with the acid bath, but mix that rock in with good cured live rock or bust up some LR into pieces and sprinkle it on the dead rock and you will have decent live rock relatively quickly. Either way, it will take time, so it is really a matter of preference which path you want to take. There are advantages and disadvantages to each method.

I think this just may be a case of not enough acid cleaning, so you probably have some leftover stuff bound in the rocks, which will leech out, but will not take as long as if you didn't acid bath them. Also, it could be the result of the rock 'cooking' in the tank, meaning that it is getting re-colonized, and there is basically a cycle happening within the rock that is causing a rather dynamic situation, and algae tends to 'take advantage' of dynamic situations. Once the rock has stabilized, the algae will likely not be a problem. At least that is my take on it.

[Floyd R Turbo]

Bud I have cleaned the pipe every week with the harvest and use the toothbrush to clean the top of the screen.

Use the brush with the stiff black bristles to clean the top inch of the screen. Scrub it hard. I use that brush on the slot as well. I find that I only use the toothbrush on the screen after scraping, and very lightly to get the loose algae off. Sometimes I use it to scrub the slot pipe, but I usually use the stiff brush.

[gguertin145]

Well guess I just want to prevent this from moving from an irritation to an outbreak.

I had a really bad cyano issue on my old tank so building the new one I let the rock dry for 2 months then bleached it and used muriatic acid... I was under the impression it removed phosphates but guess its possible there was some dead material inside the rock that didnt get removed? Would running a skimmer help with this or is there something I should do to make the scrubber more aggressive. I would rather not watch algae grow in the display for 6 months before it goes away :(

[SantaMonica]

Obviously if it soaked long enough to start dissolving the calcium carbonate, the ultra low pH would have removed most of the phosphate.