Miracles 144/125 Rimless

[Floyd R Turbo]

What acrylic? If you mean for the sump, I have an acrylic fabrication shop in my garage. If you mean the overflow insert, that came with the tank.

[Floyd R Turbo]

I find myself in a conundrum. Look back in this thread and you'll see that the first week with the new setup has great green growth, and since then it has steadily declined. Here are pics from the last 2 sets of cleanings:

01/23/2012





The gooey yellow and slimy brown stuff came off with a light swipe and was kind of straw-like I suppose in that it felt like I was scraping a credit card across the 'hooks' side of a patch of velcro, and beneath it was this:



Here is the 'goo' layer



...and here is the rest of what I scraped off



barely enough to cover the palm of my hand



The next cleaning was yesterday 2/2/12 and wasn't much different



other side



beneath the goo layer



This type of growth has a rather pungent smell to it. I have to make sure that I come in after the office closes to clean it, because while I'm used to it, let's just say the staff is not! The stink disappears as soon as I put the goo layer down the disposal.

This time I left most of the green on the screen and scrubbed the top and bottom inch to clear the slot and red turf.

My lights are currently 16 on 8 off, lamp are only a month or so old, 4x T5HO, screen is 14.5" wide and about 6.5" tall (effective) so that's about 7 cubes a day max, and the tank is being fed about half of that probably. I am also getting a lot of slime coming off the screen and it tends to build up on the bubble-blocker basket I have surrounding the outflow (which is made of plastic canvas) and then I have a baffle section with white egg crate and more plastic canvas that grows a nice colony of the thin, brown slime tendrils every 10 days, which I believe to be dinos. The top of the water in the pump intake section is stagnant and grows a nice layer of foamy goo which resembles the goo layer of the screen.

The N is rock solid zero and P was 0.06 2 days before cleaning. It was 0.01 a week or so back. Alk 8-9, Cal 400-425ish, Mag 1350, Salinity 34ppt, pH 8ish. Corals and fish doing just fine, no nuisance algae in the tank.

I am starting to question my use of the plastic canvas through the system. There is another thread on here regarding algae growth on white egg crate and also a reference to Sanjay's carbon dosing experiment where he found Brute trash cans and other plastic containers seemed to breed bacteria well. I am wondering if this could be the case in this system, using lots of canvas in several areas is leading to a bacterial colony feeding ground? I use it in the overflow box to break the fall of the weir, then in the intake/baffle section of the sump to prevent salt creep (and it works awesome), then the scrubber screen (obviously), the outflow tee has some inserted into it, the basket surrounding the outflow from the scrubber, and in front of the last baffle (#5) to snag any big stuff.

Anyways, any thoughts?

I find myself on the other side of the fence here. Normally I would tell someone in this situation that they do not have enough nutrients and they should feed more or downsize the screen, or cut the photoperiod. I downsized the screen once and I suppose I could shave another inch or so off. But I think I would rather down the photoperiod if that is a fix. Since I'm not using "double the light" is this OK to do? Should I just keep bumping down the photoperiod until the nutrients start to rise?

I'm also wondering if the brown slimy dino growth is a result of the algae not being able to get to the P since there's no N, and something else then uses the light to process whatever is available. Any thoughts on that?

Just trying to throw some ideas out. I come across this type of issue on RC, people saying they're just growing slime and I'd like to figure it out.

[Ace25]

I believe this is the article your referencing in regards to Brute trash cans being a bacteria feeding ground. I was actually suprised it took this long for something to be published about it because I would think anyone who has used plastic trashcans for mixing water and left a little at the bottom for a week or so would have seen this problem. I know I have. Actually, just yesterday I pulled an old white 5G water jug out of the closet to fill up with 1.018 SW for my rotifer buckets and there was about 1/4 cup of saltwater still in the bottom. Probably sat for over a year, and it was just a solid geletin mass.

Still, plastic is plastic and I really don't see how using egg crate would be that much different than canvas other than it would have less surface area for bacteria to colonize on. This is one of the biggest reasons I also tell people they shouldn't carbon dose when using at ATS because I do think the ATS provides plenty of opportunity for bacteria to grow without the need for extra dosing, liquid or solid. When I ran a dual screen / dual layer setup I had a ton of bacteria in the sump, like you describe, but probably 10x worse since I didn't use a basket to catch most of it. I could literally take a net and scoop out about 1/2 gallon of "snot" from the surface and walls of the sump every couple days on my original ATS setup. Another problem I had though was I was using a rubbermaid container as a sump, again, all plastic, so the entire sump was also food for bacteria. Then I made the fatal mistake of adding a Bio-Pellet reactor during this time.. talk about a quick tank crash. I did all this before the article was published and I had my suspicions it was the plastic (more so once bio-pellets came out and I saw it was plastic that feeds them) and the article was the final straw that pushed me into getting rid of as much plastic out of my system as I could. I still have questions about ABS though, I am curious if that also feeds bacteria since I use ABS for baffles and making ATS boxes out of.

http://www.advancedaquarist.com/2011/3/aafeature

On the scrubber pictured, my opinion, I do think reducing the light hours will make all the difference. I would drop it down to 12/12 for now and see how that works for you before making any other changes. I would put $ that you would not get nearly as much "goo" and a lot more green.

[Floyd R Turbo]

Very interesting. So I might in effect be carbon dosing my system to some extent? The plastic canvas has such a great surface area so this would make sense I suppose. I wish someone would take Sanjay's article and dig into the plastic question. I guess I could make more of the parts out of acrylic and see if that helps get rid of the dark slime layer on top of the algae mat and the stuff in the sump. I'm kind of bummed out now though because that plastic canvas is very useful for everything I described. It seems there is no real easy answer because I even have some of the 1/4" nylon netting right at the weir and that grows slime on it too. Seems that anything plastic is a bacterial magnet.

I'll knock the light back a couple more hours and see what happens. Thanks!

[kerry]

I have to clean my screen this weekend Floyd and will try to get pics. My screen cleanings are similar to yours but not that bad and the only plastic I have in my system is the canvas screen, pump, pvc and fittings.

[SantaMonica]

The lack of green now is from lack of nutrients; you've pulled them down as far as your design can do. So the goo grows instead.

The smell is dead roots under the goo, which cannot get light/flow.

The solution is to clean a bit more often, but if you can, reduce hours a bit so the roots don't die.

[Floyd R Turbo]

Thanks. I usually try to stop in an check the growth a couple times in between cleanings. The yellowish growth seems to dominate lately throughout the entire growth cycle, and the brown coating (looks like dinos to me) is what I thought was making it smell, but I could be wrong. I'm guessing that the yellow bubbly growth does a good job of blocking light, but it doesn't block it enough to cause detachment, at least not yet. I have been going 10 days between cleanings, I will probably go 8 and see if that makes a difference.

I thought that since I was getting some green growth underneath that there might be benefit in stopping in at the 5 day point and doing a quick surface scrape of the yellow stuff. I don't know if that would encourage more green, since like you said, it's pulled the nutrients down pretty well.

[Floyd R Turbo]

I have reduced the photoperiod to 11 hours on, I cleaned the screen yesterday for the first time since running this photoperiod for the full 10 days. The growth in the box (that attaches to the acrylic) has diminished, which is nice. At the last cleaning, I left a good portion of the GHA on the screen and this seemed to help, but I am still getting a lot of the slim growth which I think it detaching and being caught in the bubble-trap basket I have set up in the sump.

Here's pics of the screen before cleaning





And here's the bubble-trap basket before cleaning



I am in the process of uploading a few YouTube videos. This first one should be done in about 5 minutes. The others will take a bit longer, I'll post them as they come.

First one shows the system before I shut it down to clean. Second shows cleaning of the goo layer (and it's long, so probably will take 30 minutes to upload). Third shows the after scraping the screen.

[kerry]

Floyd, that stuff you have is much more different then my dark algae. My dark stuff is really a dark green. Next time I clean I will try to remember and spread out the scrapped algae to show the color against the white sink.

[Floyd R Turbo]

Well the #1 vid failed for some reason. Here's the long one though

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=efRuI4JcMx0