6x4x2 ats/sand bed

[nige]

finally got round to building a ats was running bio pellets/pearls but run into problems with cyano gha and bryopsis no3 always reads 0 and po4 0.015 could be lower as last three colours on the d+d kit are hard to tell apart run extra po4 reactor to bring po4 down this brought the algae well down and what was left was dying but cyano got worse so decided to do something different and here are the results

[Garf]

Hello nige - any particular reason you chose this design ? Most other people are going small with UAS or waterfalls, but you've gone HUGE with a one sided horizontal ! It must be quite noisy and I'm pretty confident you ain't got the right screen material or enough flow or enough light. Perhaps Kerry could help you with this because he runs a horizontal.

[SantaMonica]

Don't forget to lay your roughed up plastic canvas over the plexiglass

[Floyd R Turbo]

Very interesting. You need reflectors on your CFLs, you're losing 70% of the light without them. Also I would put roughed-up plastic canvas on top of the acrylic, the acrylic itself will not hold algae very well because it is difficult to rough it up sufficiently - it's just not the ideal substrate.

On the size & capacity, just for reference: the plates look like about 12" each, total of 48" in length? So you've got 576 sq in of scrubbing substrate, divide by 4 for non-vertical gives you 144, divide by 12 gives you roughly 12 cubes/day of capacity. For that you would need 144 watts of lighting if it were a vertical scrubber, 1.5-2x that for non-vertical, so ideally you're looking at a minimum of about 216 watts and as much as 288 watts of light to get that 12 cube/day capacity. It looks like you have 4 x 23w or maybe 32w so you're about 100-120W or about half as much as the minimum, so I would say you should be able to feed about 5 or 6 cubes/day with this scrubber, and that's if you get good wide reflectors in there to throw all of the light on to the screen. Without that, your filtration capability drops way down, probably only 1-2 cubes/day.

With that low of a light level, you might also have a hard time getting the green algae to grow, because you need a lot of intensity to get that going.

Just food for thought, it's always good to know what to expect and what to watch out for. With N and P that low to begin with, you might start getting some green as long as you don't feed too much before it gets going, but only if you get reflectors installed. So that is the first thing I would do.

[nige]

This was after the first week mostly brown slimy stuff but starting to green underneath

[nige]

Very interesting. You need reflectors on your CFLs, you're losing 70% of the light without them. Also I would put roughed-up plastic canvas on top of the acrylic, the acrylic itself will not hold algae very well because it is difficult to rough it up sufficiently - it's just not the ideal substrate.

On the size & capacity, just for reference: the plates look like about 12" each, total of 48" in length? So you've got 576 sq in of scrubbing substrate, divide by 4 for non-vertical gives you 144, divide by 12 gives you roughly 12 cubes/day of capacity. For that you would need 144 watts of lighting if it were a vertical scrubber, 1.5-2x that for non-vertical, so ideally you're looking at a minimum of about 216 watts and as much as 288 watts of light to get that 12 cube/day capacity. It looks like you have 4 x 23w or maybe 32w so you're about 100-120W or about half as much as the minimum, so I would say you should be able to feed about 5 or 6 cubes/day with this scrubber, and that's if you get good wide reflectors in there to throw all of the light on to the screen. Without that, your filtration capability drops way down, probably only 1-2 cubes/day.

With that low of a light level, you might also have a hard time getting the green algae to grow, because you need a lot of intensity to get that going.

Just food for thought, it's always good to know what to expect and what to watch out for. With N and P that low to begin with, you might start getting some green as long as you don't feed too much before it gets going, but only if you get reflectors installed. So that is the first thing I would do.

I have reflectors over them the acrylic is rough as I used course sand paper on it and then scoured it up with a hole saw I do not feed heavy as my stock is not that high for the size of system I have apart from maybe a shoal of chromis no more stock will be added the scrubber get's a lot of light spill from the display as it sit above the tank and the overflow goes directly into the display tank I'am still running a skimmer and po4 remover until the plates get going area is 36"x10" so that's 360"sq lights are only 11w each but as I said the plates get a lot of light without them from the main display lights but do plan to put bigger bulbs in just had these laying around and tried them

[Floyd R Turbo]

Ahhh...reflectors...you were holding out on us LOL

[Garf]

Be even better with proper screen material. I tried scrubbing a while ago with roughed up Perspex covered with drilled holes and it never got thick, then I gave up. It wasn't till I used the proper canvas screening that I had success. I also have tried lower light levels than recommended and that wasn't able to get thick algae either. Hope yours really takes off.

[nige]

It's not horizontal they are at 40degrees actually not that noisy as the water level is just below where the water run of the plates as for screen material had trouble finding stuff may have a look on ebay but I have roughed them up a lot

[nige]

Ahhh...reflectors...you were holding out on us LOL

No holding out lol first picture was taken the day I built it reflectors went on next day.