Nice review there SM!
Nice review there SM!
Thanks... he does a great job of explaining how it works...
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yz_Ya19_kOg
Congrates SantaMonia! Watching the videos now.
Me too. Huge!
Just had a chance to watch the last video.
Good review. Hope you get plenty of sales from this.
Was that really 4 weeks growth though? It doesn't seem much for 4 weeks & we know that your SM100 can grow a lot more than that in just one week.
But I suppose he was running a skimmer and sock at the same time.
A skimmer does not affect it. But since he let it grow 4 weeks, the dark high-nutrient growth stopped further growth. And some of the growth had already let go from the screen.
Yeah I wondered about that, he said in the video "we'll come back next month and see how it looks" and I wondered what to expect. If you look in the video, when they pull out the screen, the box has a bunch of algae inside it. So I hope they taught the owner how to clean it every week. I would hate to see them come back and say that it didn't work as expected in the long run because they didn't clean it often enough
Not a fan of LA Fishguy myself, he uses tap water just run through a pre-filter or Natural Sea Water for water changes (both are highly frowned upon in this area, Los Angeles has bad tap water and bad NSW) and he built an ATS last year all wrong and then said they don't work, even after a bunch of people tried to tell him what he did wrong and how to correct it. I do commend him for making videos and sharing with the world but not a fan of the bad information I feel he gives, I would rather watch http://www.mrsaltwatertank.com because he seems to give better information. Even at the end of the new ATS video he doesn't recognize the work Santa Monica has done for the scrubbers, ie. figuring out proper light and flow requirements, he just says Santa Monica made a scrubber that is retrofittable. While on one hand it is giving Santa Monica some free press, on the other hand most reefers (especially the Pro Skimmer camp) watching the video would laugh and the tiny amount of algae coming off the screen due to not properly cleaning it at the recommended time and use that video to show how skimmers are better because they get more stuff in their cup in a week than LA Fishguy scraped off the screen in a month (I know it isn't the same, comparing apples to oranges, but that doesn't bother the Pro Skimmer camp when they go off on scrubbers).
LA Fishguy's first ATS attempt in June 2010, all 8 parts.
Part 1 - http://www.youtube.com/user/lafishguy#p ... PoxQ_92sEg
Part 2 - http://www.youtube.com/user/lafishguy#p ... S3z8piIk4A
Part 3 - http://www.youtube.com/user/lafishguy#p ... l3kac7xmSM
Part 4 - http://www.youtube.com/user/lafishguy#p ... TYqm4yUTIw
Part 5 - http://www.youtube.com/user/lafishguy#p ... _zAvCBek_g
Part 6 - http://www.youtube.com/user/lafishguy#p ... DuW-VpOl4U
Part 7 - http://www.youtube.com/user/lafishguy#p ... Wh1CJXYb-U (Go to 11:05 in this video, does anyone agree with him on his statement? Many of my "reef fish" (leopard wrasses, anthias) require feeding 4-5x a day and I dump 10 cubes worth of food in my 75G a day, the more food I put in the tank, the more the algae in the tank goes away because the screen grows more and my corals look better.
Part 8 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMnzHXHBpbE (starts at 30seconds where he starts by saying he doesn't think the algae scrubber helped, looking at his design, it is easy to tell why, but as you can hear in the video at 45seconds, he was not open to suggestions on altering his setup to make it work properly, also, using a plastic container for anything on a tank is asking for big trouble because the plastic feeds bacteria and causes things like cyano blooms, which I can see in his algae scrubber. A rubbermaid container does the same thing as bio-pellets, even Advanced Aquarist showed this in their recent bacteria article)
Well I just watched all 8 videos. I should point out that he did not make a scrubber... he made a fuge. So that is why it did not work... fuge's are very weak exports, because of the slow (almost zero) flow, and weak lighting (only the surface gets full lighting). There are of course ways to make a fuge stronger, but if you are not trying to grow amphipods and mini-stars, then you might as well build a scrubber.
Yup, it is a fuge, but he calls both his old and new ones "Algae Filters" and "Algae Scrubbers" within the same videos at times. I know I tried to help him by explaining with just a little tweaking he could make a good working scrubber out of the mess he made by simply installing an elbo and a pipe with a slot for the screen and cap on the end, then lower his drain line, actually just keep a bulkhead in the bottom for a drain, so there is minimal water sitting on the bottom and just use some regular CFL lights. But I, like everyone else that offers helpful suggestions, was pretty much told "thanks but no thanks".
I tried those 65w Costco $10 lights myself on a fuge, way to powerful for a standard fuge, wrong spectrum (6500k, although he says it is the perfect spectrum for algae), and they get really hot. Plus the design of the bulb means a lot of light is wasted by reflecting into itself. He could have hung a couple CFLs from the lid facing a screen and it would have worked great, but the problem appears to be he doesn't service those tanks weekly, so if he isn't going to clean screens as required, and the owners won't do it, then an algae scrubber is not going to be the right option for him to use in his line of work. I see no way of getting around that, so I can see in another month him making another video saying the SM100 scrubber does not work either, even with people telling him he is doing it wrong.
I have watched most of his videos and he seems to have a problem with newer methods and following instructions properly. I think even you will agree Santa Monica that simply flipping rocks over that are covered in hair algae is not a good idea, between the bacteria die off and algae die off, with no proper means of export (his "fuge" was never going to cut it) it is going to lead to nasty stuff in the water, which he counters by doing "large 30G water changes with Natural Sea Water" which from my past experience using UCSB NSW is very nasty water, very high in nutrients. I just wish he would spend more time reading and keeping up to date with the hobby instead of going off what he learned in the 80's or trying any bottle of magic that promises results (lanthanum).
On the topic of Lanthanum, I just did a quick google search, like any responsible reefkeeper should do before trying a new product, and by typing "lanthanum reef tank" google gave me this result below. First couple clicks and 30 seconds of reading was enough for me to know if I were to use it (which I would have no reason to because I know of much better ways to control phosphates) I would take all proper precautions, but LAFish guy just squeezed a bottle directly into the top of the tank! I am almost positive that is what killed that giant boxfish in the tank and yet he goes on to say he thinks it helped the tank the most.
If you add liquid phosphate remover (lanthanum chloride) directly to your tank it will react with the phosphate in your water to form lanthanum phosphate which needs to be removed from your tank to remove the phosphate. Also the lanthanum phosphate crystals formed can be dangerous to your fish where these crystals can get lodged or cause damage to the fish gill structures. This is why you need to dose lanthanum chloride in front of a 10 micron filter to remove the precipitate. It is best to add the lanthanum chloride in a proper side loop with appropriate filtration
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