week one of Lego Scrubber

[misoldier06]

Okay so, i started my algae scrubber. I just took a bucket, put two 36Watt CF lamps on it, put a powerhead in the tank and put a return pump in the bucket. I took a flat lego piece and my Dremel and scratched the hell out of it. here it is at week one. My NO3 was at over 100PPM. In a week in dropped to 25 PPM. Seriously, it was that fast. It was really frustrating trying to get the pumps to pump a even amount of water out of each other but after two weeks they've finally gotten in sync. I just tested my N03 level last night and it read i would guess 5PPM. awesome... the thing is. My tank looks disgusting. It has really nasty algae with bubbles all over the rock and some pulling the algae off of the rock and forming it into a string of algae. This is not bubble algae. My phosphates are also 0PPM. I dont know where all the bubbles are coming from but i want them out. How can my new tank have such clear water and my tank with 0 phosphates and 5ppm of nitrates look so bad?


Before cleaning.

After cleaning

[misoldier06]

here is a pic of the new tank and the tank i'm running the scrubber on.
new tank

scrubbed tank

here is a close up of the bubbles

[SantaMonica]

It's good that your lego plate gave you an idea of how algae can remove nutrients. Do consider building a real one with two-sided plastic canvas; you'll need to, in order to make things happen quick enough. Algae will not be able to hold on to that plate when the algae gets heavy.

The algae that is in your tank now is doing the filtering, and absorbing the nutrients. The bubbles are the oxygen that algae produces when it grows.