My "Santa Monica 100 Scrubber"

Hi Sklywag, Thanks for the feedback. I have posted a couple more pictures. The first one is a before shot and it shows my water was a bit cloudy. The second picture is from this past week and you can see that the water is alot clearer now. The tank stays consistenly clearer now with the Santa Monica. I have two girls, ages 6 and 15. They, and all their friends around the nieghborhood, love to get in on the action and they feed the fish daily too. These fish never go hungry and without the Santa Monica, I would be in big trouble!

BTW, I have always run a filter sock to remove the big particles from the water quickly. Even now with the Santa Monica, a filter sock filters all the water as it drains out of the unit below.

I used to have to clean my glass of algae growth every couple of days before the Santa Monica and now I only have to clean it about a third as often. I don't have any pictures with the glass full of algae (I never wanted to save a picture of that!). My 4 tangs are always picking away at algae on the rock too so the rock looks about the same as before. My main problem was that I just had borderline water quality. I was the cause of my water quality issues because I always liked (and still like) to keep my tank well stocked, well fed, and I don't like having a display tank chock full of rocks either. I used to have to keep a bottle of aquasafe water conditioner nearby so I could put in a cap full of the stuff once a week or so just to make sure that the Ammonia, Nitrites and Nitrates were'nt harming the fish. Now that I have a Santa Monica, I can still keep my tank well stocked and fish well fed and my Ammonia, Nitrites and Nitrates are amazingly zero all the time. I don't need the aquasafe anymore!

Good luck finishing up your own ATS. I am looking forward to your own posts about it.

-C

hi there why would you keep the salinity so low what benefits do you get . your saying its 15ppm but what the experts are saying now are that the refractors we use are for the food trade and that instead of keeping are water at 35ppm we should keep it at 37ppm so why do you have it so low as far as iam concerned its 20ppm to low . just my two pence worth :D

Hi Oceanrock, I maintain 15ppt salinity to keep my fish only tank free of protozoal parasites like Ich. With a fish only display tank, you can maintain 15ppt (or try 16-18ppt if you prefer) indefinitely and the fish are quite healthy and more active than ever. Cryptocaryon irritans and velvet are literally "eliminated" from your display tank using this method. Commercial outfits have been doing this for years with great success and I haven't been able to find a single thread where this process has been proven to be harmful to any fish over the short or long haul. Here are a few links where you can read up on the 115 ppt method if you are interested.

The Ultimate Aquarium
http://www.wetwebmedia.com/ca/volume.../Angelfish.htm

News from the Warfront with Cryptocaryon irritans
http://www.advancedaquarist.com/issu...2003/mini1.htm

Reefkeeping myths
http://www.reefaquariumforum.com/ree...ths-t3397.html

Note that if you have corals/Invertibrates, you cannot take your salinity this low for the long haul. My tangs stay ich free and even a tang that I recently brought home with some ich is now "ich free" so I feel that this solution is ultra healthy for my tank.

Here are a couple of new pictures of algae from the ATS. This is about a weeks worth. The water quality is such that I've stopped doing water changes and have moved on to dosing with pickling lime.

I probably won't update this particular post again as it has run its course with a positive outcome. However, if anyone has a question, please do not hesitate to ask. I will be happy to respond.

Thanks again to Santa Monica for building an ATS that is worth its weight in gold.

I've been running this SM scrubber for a while now and it is working as advertised. Here are a couple of pictures I took of the SM yesterday before doing a weekly screen cleaning. As you can see, I get plenty of algae growth. Nitrates, Nitrites, Ammonia are always zero now. Before - not usually. PH is steady at 8.1 - 8.4. Phosphates are gone!. The algae on my rocks is receeding too.

Now, just for the record, I was getting good results using the system exactly as it arrived but I like to dabble a bit so I made a couple of adjustments that seem to have put my scrubber into turbo scrubber mode (haha). The SM comes with a standard 1" bulkhead to drain the water out of the unit. I flipped the bulkhead around so that the long end is sticking up rather than down. This simple 10 minute change made the water level rise by approximately an extra inch and a half or so. The SM is uniquely designed in a way that it bathes the algae so I figured why not bath the algae some more. Now I get this 3D effect whereby the light is able to penetrate through all of this thick floating algae even better. After I did this, I would clean my screen weekly and within 4 days, the SM would be stuffed full of algae again. With all this turbo algae growth going on, I ended up adding a second drain using a spare 1" bulkhead I had laying around. The second bulkhead is reversed as well and this extra drain gives reduces the risk of the drain getting plugged up (it hasn't).

I also put a couple of 200 micron filter socks under the drains. I know they catch the food but they keep with water crystal clear so I use them.

Yes 3D is better, it's just a trade off between higher filtering, and overflowing :)

So then, are you guys saying it's better to have the scrubber submerged?

No. It just needs lots of rapid flow.

The Santa Monica ATS is designed to hold about 1/2 inch of water at the bottom of the chamber where the light shines in and the screen sits. In effect, if you own an SM (Santa Monica ATS) you get some of this 3D slurr effect already and this (I believe) is why Santa Monica's ATS works so much better then my own DIY ATS worked. If you raise the water level of your SM, you get even faster algae growth in this slur area. The thing is, you need a Santa Monica ATS or your own design needs to incorporate a chamber like the SM has in order for this to work.

One thing to keep in mind, is that the 3D growth is going to look like a lot more, even if it is not. So you'll want to do some tests, by drying out the algae for a week and weighing it, to see if it is actually more.