+ Reply to Thread
Page 8 of 8 FirstFirst 12345678
Results 71 to 79 of 79

Thread: The Great Algae-Light Source Experiment

  1. #71
    Banned
    Join Date
    Aug 2010
    Location
    USA
    Posts
    2,710

  2. #72

    Join Date
    Sep 2012
    Location
    Merritt Island, FL, USA
    Posts
    37
    If you happen to revive this master plan, maybe use this as a standard fertilizer:
    http://florida-aqua-farms.com/secure...ACRO_NUTRIENTS

    The first one listed is that Guillard F/2 formulation that an earlier poster referenced ( https://ncma.bigelow.org/node/79 ) . They also have a trace pack further down where you add your own Ammonia or Nitrate, and Phosphate. Using these looks like it could get expensive, but they seem to have lots of different options.

  3. #73
    Banned
    Join Date
    Aug 2010
    Location
    USA
    Posts
    2,710
    Fantastic! Thanks!

  4. #74
    Banned
    Join Date
    Aug 2010
    Location
    USA
    Posts
    2,710
    After almost 2 years of considering performing this experiment, something dawned on my last night as I was brushing my teeth. I recently performed a large tank move (2nd move of that system within a month) and the result is that the water is high in N and P. No coral in the tank so it's fine. There is even 0.5ppm ammonia but I've been treating the tank with Prime until I get the scrubber going.

    So this has been on my mind, and somehow my mind switched over to my scrubber experiment. I have been trying to think of a way to benchmark test various scrubber setups with respect to size of screen, light type, photoperiod, flow rate, etc etc but have been hung up on the source of dirty water. Adding fertilizer to the water seemed OK, but did not seem like a way to get a natural result. Plus, there was the issue of starting out with 'clean' saltwater, which would need to be seeded with some kind of algae somehow. Using a small tank with an few fish and some live rock would be fine, but would not create enough waste for the scrubber, IMO. Then there would be issues with matching the conditions of the water, etc. Nothing seemed to make good sense.

    In a fraction of a second last night, it came to me.

    The plan now is to set up a large tank with plenty of fish and soft corals or LPS, feed it heavily, and let the nutrients stay elevated. Then, I will save the water removed from this tank during PWCs and put that water into 10 gallon test tanks, which will be running the test unit scrubbers. So now I will have a bank of scrubbers running on small water volumes, and I can monitor nutrient uptake and growth in a more scientific fashion.

    The scrubber screens will all be cured up on the same tank, so they will all start out with the same initial conditions, and all with the same algae growing on them. Then the test will be performed.

    If I wanted to get really crazy, I could set up an automatic water change system that constantly drips water out of the display tank and into the scrubber tanks, which would then constantly drain the water out of the system (down the drain). This would be how I would be able to monitor growth only, ignoring nutrient uptake. One of the caveats of the first method is that after I pull water from the tank into a small volume, as concentrations of various nutrients decreases, the growth types may shift, which may influence the experiment.

    The nice thing is that I have over 600lb of rock to deal with for this experiment, about 200 of which just came out of a tank with uber-high nutrients. I was going to acid bath the stuff but now I might just put it in a tank and let it muck up the water some. Got 2x 5g buckets of sand out of the same tank as well. I also have about 6 L2 units that have mistakes that I have been hanging on to for purposes of this experiment. Now I have a purpose.

    Still need the TIME!!

  5. #75
    Banned
    Join Date
    Sep 2011
    Location
    pennsylvania, usa
    Posts
    406
    All sounds good except the part where you seed the screens in the same tank. You should start with a new screen on each set up. We dont know if different light sources grow different types of algae and how they compare to each other.

  6. #76
    Banned
    Join Date
    Aug 2010
    Location
    USA
    Posts
    2,710
    My plan was to cure all the screens using the same base configuration of lighting, 6x 660nm Red and 2x 440-450nm 1/2 power blues, then when it was time to run the experiments for the different bandwidths, I would scrape the screens down and run that experiment. I imagine that continuing the experiment from that point forward for a number of weeks would eventually result in different types of growth on the isolated scrubbers.

    The first step, in my thought process, was to establish a control sequence. I would cure each screen together, then run them in isolation to verify that I was getting identical results on identical isolated systems. After that 'control' experiment was run and verified, I could then proceed to variances between isolated units.

  7. #77

    Join Date
    Oct 2010
    Location
    venezuela
    Posts
    131
    Really it would be a great idea you pose Floyd, really very useful for us

    On the other hand you think test, ie the methodology will mesh size versus the light it receives or something

    regards

  8. #78
    Banned
    Join Date
    Aug 2010
    Location
    USA
    Posts
    2,710
    Tebo, are you asking if I could test different types of substrate?

  9. #79

    Join Date
    Oct 2010
    Location
    venezuela
    Posts
    131
    No sorry I misspoke, my English is not very good,,, what I mean is that if you can probe different net sizes and growth under different light intensities

+ Reply to Thread
Page 8 of 8 FirstFirst 12345678

Thread Information

Users Browsing this Thread

There are currently 1 users browsing this thread. (0 members and 1 guests)

Posting Permissions

  • You may not post new threads
  • You may not post replies
  • You may not post attachments
  • You may not edit your posts