Intro' and thoughts on this simple design

[Rumpy Pumpy]

Why don't you get the acrylic scrubber that greg is selling:

viewtopic.php?f=2&t=163&p=1141&hilit=sale#p1141

...it's exactly like mine, only 6.5 inches tall.

Cheers for that. I'm PM'd him about shipping to the UK.

[Rumpy Pumpy]

Update:

My experimental scrubber is showing a little growth after 5 days

[worley]

Considering the lack of flow and lighting, that's quite encouraging

[Rumpy Pumpy]

Considering the lack of flow and lighting, that's quite encouraging

Yes, I hadn't looked at it for a couple of days and was quite surprised.

I'm not expecting it to do much filtering though.

I'm going away for a week on Sunday and will leave it running and see how it looks when I get back.

[worley]

I would suggest you clean one half of the screen before then

[Rumpy Pumpy]

UPDATE

I didn't clean any of the canvas before I went away as suggested. I would have done, but didn't read the above before I left.

Anyhow, this is what it looked like yesterday (it had been running for about 2 weeks at this point)




I took the canvas down to clean it and it looked like this, obviously the growth is much more where the flow of water was at it's highest. Note though that the bottom inch or two on the left hand side of the canvas has growth all along it's width. This part was submerged in the water.




A good scraping yielded this small handful of algae




I've reassembled it now and it looks like this




Nitrates are a bit lower (can't give you any numbers as I lost the colour chart for the test kit. Doh!)

Going forward, I have an idea to construct v.2 from a large roasting tin



which would sit on top of the sump with the canvas suspended by the grill and water trickled into the centre from above and allowed to run off around the sides. It would also have additional lighting.

Obviously a hole or holes would have to be drilled to allow the water to run into the sump.


Thoughts?

[SantaMonica]

Not bad growth. May work decently.

The grill is metal... you probably don't want SW on that.

[Rumpy Pumpy]

Not bad growth. May work decently.

The grill is metal... you probably don't want SW on that.

Fair comment.

It's actually FW but still...

I'm sure it won't be too difficult to rig up some kind of plastic alternative support.

[Rumpy Pumpy]

A slightly different approach.

Ditched the roasting tray idea for the moment and have gone for this

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7lLTcOC8Vo


As you can see the canvas is now stretched across and slightly submerged inside the sump with water passing over (and under) it. The sump throughput is approx 6000-7000 litres per hour (just put a new pump in today) and I reckon a good proportion of that is passing over the canvas.

The light is still too little and will be upgraded shortly.

I think I may need to make the canvas more rigid and perhaps install a piece of perspex between the water and the light


Views?

[worley]

Get it closer to the surface of the water if you can, also, more light =).
Ok so maybe I'm going overkill with my 240W of fluroescent lights!