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Thread: Adding Eggcrate to Systems

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    Adding Eggcrate to Systems

    Hey all, I have been using my scrubber for around 6 months now probably. I was getting nice green growth as well as nice patches of red turf on the sections of higher flow. I added some egg crate frag racks in the beginning of Dec, and things got funky. I instantly got some sort of blackish yellowish algae starting to grow on my screen. I started removing them immediately and noticed they smelled horrible. My skimmer also decided to act up. Then I get some cheato and added that to the sump since I had no place to put it. A few weeks later.

    Have any of you recently run into similar situations with eggcrate?

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    Anything like egg crate or a QT basket, etc that sits in your tank for a while will generally smell bad when you remove it. As for the screen change, dunno. I added a small DIY frag rack to my system and it quickly became a magnet for cyano and dino growth. I guess I didn't pay attention to whether which came first though...hmmm...

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    Lots of dead stuff in the frags, causing darking screen growth.

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    I added quite a bit of EC'ing to my nano tank that I plumbed into my 120. Things got very bad in both tanks. Huge dino bloom on the EC, and algae bloom in DT.

    I'm certain there are silicates and other goodies in the material.

    This was posted here before: http://www.advancedaquarist.com/2011/3/aafeature

    "The real surprise is the red line of Fig. 11; it documents the substantial increase in bacteria/mL for a control water sample that was not treated with EtOH. We simply removed about ½ gallon of water from the tub at the beginning of the experiment, and placed it in an open Tupperware container under fluorescent room lighting. This control portion of tank water was sampled for bacteria content daily just like the EtOH-treated larger tub water sample. Remarkably enough, the bacteria population in this control sample experienced a slower but still significant rise, increasing to a maximum of ~ 27x the original level after 3 days. What is fueling this bacterial growth? Since we have already determined that the bacteria population in this aquarium water sample is carbon limited, it seems reasonable to hypothesize that the Tupperware vessel itself is providing a metabolizable source of carbon! This vessel had been used in various water transfers previously, and it was rinsed with tap water and dried between uses. Could organic residue or bacterial films coat the plastic? Is the plastic itself "digestible" to the water column bacteria? These questions are not answerable at present, but the overall observation that the plastic container itself (or residue on its surface), and not necessarily the EtOH addition, can contribute to a significant increase in water column bacteria population raises some concerns about the interpretation of the results in Fig 10 (remember the caveat)."

    There seems to be the answer to this mystery.

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    Yes, that is a great article, and I didn't think of the correlation of tupperware/rubbermaid and the bacterial issue. I have to wonder if this translates to anything plastic. in the sump of the system I run the scrubber on, I have a piece of egg crate before the return pump intake, and also a section of #5 plastic canvas. I have noticed that a long string of brown thin hair algae (like dinos) is growing from the canvas. I can move it and the stings move with it. I have canvas in 3 other spots in the sump and one in the overflow box also. It's kind of my 'wonder product' but I hope it doesn't fall into the same category as egg crate and other plastic products. I might try making an acrylic slotted baffle before the pump instead and see if that makes a difference, and maybe in a few other areas as well.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Floyd R Turbo View Post
    Anything like egg crate or a QT basket, etc that sits in your tank for a while will generally smell bad when you remove it. As for the screen change, dunno. I added a small DIY frag rack to my system and it quickly became a magnet for cyano and dino growth. I guess I didn't pay attention to whether which came first though...hmmm...

    The eggcrate didn't smell bad, it was the brown slimish stuff that was in the scrubber that smelled horrible. But yes, so far it seems as if that eggcrate is def a magnet for this stuff. I have since added 3 Turbos and they are cleaning it up well.


    Quote Originally Posted by Aeros View Post
    I added quite a bit of EC'ing to my nano tank that I plumbed into my 120. Things got very bad in both tanks. Huge dino bloom on the EC, and algae bloom in DT.

    I'm certain there are silicates and other goodies in the material.

    This was posted here before: http://www.advancedaquarist.com/2011/3/aafeature

    "The real surprise is the red line of Fig. 11; it documents the substantial increase in bacteria/mL for a control water sample that was not treated with EtOH. We simply removed about ½ gallon of water from the tub at the beginning of the experiment, and placed it in an open Tupperware container under fluorescent room lighting. This control portion of tank water was sampled for bacteria content daily just like the EtOH-treated larger tub water sample. Remarkably enough, the bacteria population in this control sample experienced a slower but still significant rise, increasing to a maximum of ~ 27x the original level after 3 days. What is fueling this bacterial growth? Since we have already determined that the bacteria population in this aquarium water sample is carbon limited, it seems reasonable to hypothesize that the Tupperware vessel itself is providing a metabolizable source of carbon! This vessel had been used in various water transfers previously, and it was rinsed with tap water and dried between uses. Could organic residue or bacterial films coat the plastic? Is the plastic itself "digestible" to the water column bacteria? These questions are not answerable at present, but the overall observation that the plastic container itself (or residue on its surface), and not necessarily the EtOH addition, can contribute to a significant increase in water column bacteria population raises some concerns about the interpretation of the results in Fig 10 (remember the caveat)."

    There seems to be the answer to this mystery.
    That is pretty amazing. I haven't seen this article before. Thanks for the link. So it is safe to say that the scrubber is helping to pull the stuff out of the EC I hope.

    Quote Originally Posted by Floyd R Turbo View Post
    Yes, that is a great article, and I didn't think of the correlation of tupperware/rubbermaid and the bacterial issue. I have to wonder if this translates to anything plastic. in the sump of the system I run the scrubber on, I have a piece of egg crate before the return pump intake, and also a section of #5 plastic canvas. I have noticed that a long string of brown thin hair algae (like dinos) is growing from the canvas. I can move it and the stings move with it. I have canvas in 3 other spots in the sump and one in the overflow box also. It's kind of my 'wonder product' but I hope it doesn't fall into the same category as egg crate and other plastic products. I might try making an acrylic slotted baffle before the pump instead and see if that makes a difference, and maybe in a few other areas as well.
    There are a lot of factors like is stated in the article. Never know what is in certain plastics.

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    I heard it's the type of plastic that the white eggcrate was made from that causes the bloom. I have a LFS that uses the black eggcrate and has never had any algae bloom on it in the years they have been opened. I would go with the black stuff you will see an immediate difference.

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