hog.5 growth

[jeffmr4]

I have been running my algae scrubber for about a week and am starting to see some light green in the white area of the scrubber. There also was a thin amount of green algae on the glass where the scrubber was. I have a clownfish, peppermint shrimp, emerald crab, turbo snail (that doesn't eat much. I question if it is a turbo snail.), two blue-legged hermit crabs, three nassarius snails, an astrea snail and about 12 to 14 pounds of live cured rock in a 10 gallon tank. The tank has been up for a little under 3 months. I switched everything from a 14 gallon biocube to a jbj rl-10-fp after about two months. I had some green algae growth and had gone through diatoms in the biocube and now I am seeing continued growth of green algae and two other bad kinds of algae. The other algae is greyish purple with strings coming up here and there and is pretty securely attached to the sand. There is another patch of this that is kind of brownish pink maybe. There are diatoms on the glass and the green hair algae is mainly on the rocks. I run a nano remora skimmer with mj600 pump, filter floss and chemipure blue in jbj's 75 gph filter and the algae scrubber. I do 25% water changes each week with petco's imagitarium water and feed a small amount of mysis shrimp to the clownfish and two scrapes off of a regular shrimp to my peppermint shrimp. I had copepods and amphipods in the biocube and have significantly less since the switch.
My water parameters are all fairly normal with 10 to 15 ppm of nitrate, phosphate somewhere below .25, temp 77, salinity about 1.025, kh 10.5, calcium 420, magnesium about 1200.
My question is, does seeing a light green in some of the cracks of the grabber surface sound about right? The scrubber light is currently on 18 hours from 4 pm to 10 am. Thank you.

[SantaMonica]

Yes it sounds right for a new scrubber in a new tank. Just let it continue for another two weeks and see how it looks.

[jeffmr4]

Thank you. I was planning on waiting. Just wanted to see that the growth was normal. My ph is a little low at 7.8 but that is normal for my tank.

[jeffmr4]

I've posted this in another thread but the middle is starting to fill in (or at least specks of it) with a bright green algae. The outsides are still very dark. The glass is also growing mostly green algae. My light time is 18 hours. Should I increase that? Also, I find that putting the scrubber below the surface yields more green algae I think.

[SantaMonica]

Leave it at 18 hours. There is not enough nutrients in the water to need more light.

Keeping it below the surface delivers more flow-through and more nutrients. If the growth were dark (excess nutrients), you want more light and to keep it above the surface to recirculate flow inside it which would bring in less nutrients.

[jeffmr4]

So I received an e-mail asking how things are going. This is the response. I upped the light time to 24 hours and am getting a lot more growth. Another thing that has helped is getting rid of some algae inside the tank so that the algae in the scrubber can out-compete it. I did this by scrubbing some of the algae off the rocks and siphoning it out of the sand. I have a couple of pictures but they are a little old. Right now I am getting a long bright green stringy algae clumped together in the middle and less cyanobacteria which is the dark stuff (at least some of it?) in the pictures. I leave the scrubber at the surface as I seemed to get more growth doing that. I'm not sure about that but the scrubber is currently in a part of the tank where I can't prevent it from producing a lot of salt creep so I am putting it at the surface. This is a little bit older picture so it doesn't show the new stringy growth.

http://i58.photobucket.com/albums/g280/jeffroach0/IMG_0002_zpsiwpwq1sm.jpg

[SantaMonica]

That is an interesting mix of growth.

[jeffmr4]

Well, its been 4 months and I don't see a lot of growth in my scrubber. There is plenty in my tank on the rocks so I know its not for lack of nutrients. I have a bunch of junk in the sand beneath the rocks that I siphoned out today. I scrubbed the rocks to see if I can give the scrubber a head start. I'm not going to remove any algae from the scrubber until its completely covered.

[SantaMonica]

Well the last pic was covered, with slime. It would need to be toothbrushed off.