Skimmers help Scrubbers breathe ?

[Ace25]

I used to think adding 660nm to a display was bad .. but last month I had 2 royal blues go out and I didn't have any replacements on hand, so I put 2 660nm in their place, WHAT A DIFFERENCE! My orange clownfish are almost neon orange.. reds really do bring out the colors much more than I imagined. I am sure that also helped a little with what I was saying above, but I only added 2 reds, I added 24 actinics at the same time which is why I felt it was the actinics providing the most benefit, although I am now sold on adding a couple reds to a display light, things really do look a lot better.

[Ace25]

Found this a few days ago if that's what you mean Ace;

Yup, those graphs are great examples of what I am talking about.. with MH lights, they use a lot of Mercury, which emits a UV spectrum (below 400nm). The add other halides with mercury in order to get the spectrum up into the visual range, but they are still mixing UV spectrum phosphors with others to get the overall color. On LEDs, that is not the case, the phosphors they use are much closer to the spectral output, ie 440nm + 460nm remote phosphor to give you a royal blue.

[Floyd R Turbo]

So would there be any benefit to using 395nm or 405nm LEDs like these?

http://www.ebay.com/itm/20W-395nm-UV...item3f17a25e74

http://www.ebay.com/itm/20W-405nm-UV...item3f1027cfd3

[Garf]

Would encourage cyano wouldn't it ?

[Ace25]

Cyano is a whole different beast in itself, and is SUPER adaptable to just about any light spectrum. You can get massive cyano outbreaks simply using all warm whites which contain very little blues and reds... heck, NASA put cyano OUTSIDE in space for 553 days, AND IT STILL LIVED!

http://news.discovery.com/space/reco...-trekkers.html

http://www.microbemagazine.org/index...-through-space

http://www.thirdage.com/news/cyanoba...ace_07-25-2011

http://www.saasta.ac.za/images/stori...NOBACTERIA.PDF

http://event.arc.nasa.gov/syntheticb...cBio_ver11.pdf

http://biomassmagazine.com/articles/...ation/?ref=brm

(Growing up on an Air Force base that launches missiles and rockets into space regularly, and having a father who was a "Missileer", I got hooked on anything space related at an early age).

[Garf]

Good job really or none of us would be here to talk about it.

[Ace25]

So would there be any benefit to using 395nm or 405nm LEDs like these?

http://www.ebay.com/itm/20W-395nm-UV...item3f17a25e74

http://www.ebay.com/itm/20W-405nm-UV...item3f1027cfd3

This goes back to my thinking of "finding a balance" within a tank. For the same reason I dislike bio-pellets, right now, the idea of adding any light at or under 400nm is just too questionable in my book at this time. Things to think about with UV light is 1. how much do you need to maintain bacteria levels at or near NSW without harming other things and 2. Is it worth the electricity and parts cost to add those LEDs which are outside the visual spectrum? My thinking is since I can't test bacteria levels, only go off N/P readings to tell me if I have a suitable population, I am starting on what I feel is the lower side/cautious approach by adding LEDs that are still within the visual spectrum but also provides a benefit for bacteria. I will keep my LEDs like they are now since it appears my P levels are slowly dropping, but if I see it stall out I will add other LEDs, possibly a few UV and IR LEDs to see if they help.

With Bio-Pellets, I feel you are just dumping a ton of food in the tank for bacteria and then putting your tank in a Yo-Yo scenerio for up to a year until everything stabilizes and finds a balance, but then by that time you refill the bio-pellets and start the process all over again. To me is just seems way to unstable of a method for my liking. I have seen them work for others, and that is great, but I still question the long term viability of them. If I can find a combination of LEDs that provide the same end result as bio-pellets without going to far (to the point my ATS screen won't grow) I think I will have found a perfect balance on my tanks using light instead of extra carbon dosing.

Like with the ATS, providing an ideal location for algae to grow, I feel this is the same for bacteria. If you provide it with the light spectrum it seems to colonize under, it will grow more. Since the ATS provides carbon to the tank, there is no need for anything extra. My end goal is to not have to use any media that requires constant replacing ($). I admit, my tank/corals have never looked/grown anywhere close to when I used to run a 20k MH with 4 420nm T5HOs, and I think I am finally starting to understand why.. the common LEDs just don't provide a good spectrum for bacteria like MH and T5s do, but now that I understand that I can fix it, and so far for me it seems to be working. My next experiment, instead of changing anything more with the display, is to change out the LEDs on my ATS. Right now it is still 6:1 660/455, I am thinking of changing it to 4 660s and 3 420's to see if that helps or hurts. I want to focus on just 1 of the types of chlorophyll (A) instead of 1 peak out of each of A/B just to see how it reacts, plus I am now thinking the 420nm LEDs will be much more beneficial than a royal blue.

[Garf]

Ace25 - I take it you stopped the bubble screen.

[Ace25]

Definitely.. UAS is a huge no-go for me. I tore down the frag tank because it was a huge failure. I believe there is something fundamentally wrong with the UAS idea right now and I don't really feel like fixing it. I have some ideas on how to make it work better, and I do think they can work much better with some proper tweaking, but since my ATS is working as good as I expect it to, and I have found a new path to explore and experiment with (bacteria), I just don't feel like messing with something I don't think I would use. I still think the best one could hope for with a UAS is maybe perform as good as most ATS's today, but I think the ATS still has some room to make it better, and since I have spent years working on ways to make the ATS better, I will continue to experiment to see if I can squeeze every last bit of use out of it.

Off topic, but there really is something to look at in regards to the airflow thing. I have done that experiment with the same positive results probably a dozen times now... if you put A LOT of airflow over an ATS screen, it will grow at 2x the rate. On mine, I use a window fan with 2 8" fans, one fan on each side of the screen set on high.. it is blasting the screen with air, and every time I do the results are insanely good in terms of growth/harvest weight, but that never correlated into reduced phosphates, at best they just didn't rise as much during the week as they do without the fan, which is why I moved on to finding out how to remedy that and my search led back to light spectrum (like it always seems to do with me, and why I have been die hard into "light" for over a decade).

[tebo]

Ace25 is really good to have you back

Right now I just finished my LED lamp, each module is 28 currently led by a ratio of almost 3:1 blue and white, will place additional 2 cyan, 2 uv, 1 gren, 1 red

What do you think of this configuration is complete for hard and soft corals, and now you pose interesting enough on bacteria, very interesting

I leave a picture, there are 100% blue loas 700mA, 1050mA whites and the rest to 700mA




regards