my scrubber stopped growing anything

[greenmachine]

Well afew weeks ago I upgraded my lights on my scrubber from led par lamps to propper phillips luxon 3 watt leds. There are 4 660 and 2 royal blue (at half power) on each side of my 5"x5" screen that has about 280gph flow. I went through the whole curing prosess with the difusers and such until I got a base of brown and green then removed the difusers. Now the only growth I am getting is jet black. After doing some testing I found my nitrates and phosphates to both be at 5ppm! I ran puragen and phos-guard,this brought the nitrate to 0 and the phosphate to 2ppm.. still nothing but black growth. Not sure what to do.

[RkyRickstr]

When I switch from CFL to leds my screen died and I had to start all over.. Led's where so much more powerful that I had to run them for 5hrs a day! I slowly ramped it up and was never able to run more than 12hrs a day without my algae turning yellow.

I would try running half the hours until you get it going.

I'n my experience the scrubber has a hard time getting the po4 down, I used chemical filtration until it was under control then the scrubber would keep it on check.

so I would suggest cutting hours way down and supplementing with chemical until everything is out of control.. you keep that phosphate that high to long and your sps if you have any will start to suffer.

[Brent1128]

I was under the impresssion that jet black meant more hours of light and/or more flow. Very light green/yellow growth would indicate dialing back the hours.

I would ramp them up from half power, or leave them on longer.

[SantaMonica]

Well something is wrong there, because the growth is not getting enough light. Maybe the LEDs are too narrow-focused.

Pics would help.

[rleahaines]

I agree with SM, I would check your LED's.

You should aim at at least .5 Watts of LED [red] for each sq. inch of area for 16 to 18 hours per day. This is actual watts - you may not actually be running your 3 Watt LED's at 3 Watts. Some of the LED's on the market that say 3 Watt are actually 2 or less. Your driver may not be actually running them at the 3 watt level as well.

The LED's should not be more than 3 inches or so from the screen as well.

If you are running 4 red LED's per side [plus 2 of the blue] your max would be 12 Watts per side - lighting 20 sq. inches.

I would increase hours, try to increase flow if you could and check the distance from the screen. If the algae starts to yellow, then go back to the diffuser.

You may also want to try adding iron to your system to green up the algae.

[RkyRickstr]

My uas.5 had the same problem. I had to cut to 6hrs till it took off

[greenmachine]

thanks for all the help guys:) I went up to 16 hours a day 2 days ago. It seems to be helping