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Thread: Skimmers help Scrubbers breathe ?

  1. #21
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    Quote Originally Posted by tebo View Post
    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
    With the way it is now, and with what you said you wanted to add, I am sure it will be fine for all types of corals as long as you placed them properly. SPS corals will certainly grow fine if placed under the modules, and LPS and softies will grow in the dimmer areas. My corners are pretty dark on my 60G and candycane corals grow the best there, under about 40 PAR.

    On the bacteria topic, maybe down the line once I see where all my testing leads me, I can design and build a special photobioreactor designed specifically for phosphate loving bacteria like they make for algae now. That way I can fine tune the flow in order to be able to have greater control over bacteria populations in the reactor. The way I am thinking now with adding the lower 400nm range to the display is more akin to vodka dosing where I am using the entire display to grow bacteria population by providing it with a better spectrum and hoping it is the phosphate eating bacteria that likes that spectrum more than other types. Early results seem to favor that hypothesis, but it is still very early in my testing. There are thousands of types of bacteria in a tank, so there is a lot of hoping on my part that I can find a specific light spectrum that matches with a certain bacteria preference and that bacteria being the type I want to grow more than others. This is where lots of testing and careful measuring of input/food comes in to play to make sure I have good data to go off of. Hopefully once I figure it out I can make a small unit the size of a calcium reactor but with near UV and/or IR LEDs around it and fed via output from a scrubber. Internally would be similar to a de-nitrate coil but it would use larger diameter clear tubing coiled up instead of small black tubing. Since the light that it will be getting will be almost out of the visual range there should be no algae buildup to worry about in the tubing. We know how a de-nitrator coil works, and we have a good understanding on how most of the algae works that we are growing in terms of N/P removal, I would like to find a way to use what I have learned to now make an ideal home for phosphate loving bacteria to grow in my system, and I think my idea is a good start but there is a long way to go.

  2. #22
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    Ace25 - I bought a UV T8 tube last month to try and get the corals to glow for photos. It was a failure. The whole tank looked like milk ( I'm guessing the bacteria showing up ). I don't mind putting this on my sump to see what happens, just for a test.

    Afterthought - natural algae is exposed to intermittent strong uv. Although science says that this is damaging to plants and algae, perhaps there are some protective processes taking place which either use or produce materials not yet discovered.

  3. #23
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    If you don't have bacteria levels even close to NSW you won't have much in the way of stuff to remove that excess carbon
    I think you'll find that the bacteria that consume carbon (DOC) are mostly heterotrophic, not autotrophic. Thus light will have little effect. It is the same mechanism as carbon dosing.

  4. #24
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    Quote Originally Posted by SantaMonica View Post
    I think you'll find that the bacteria that consume carbon (DOC) are mostly heterotrophic, not autotrophic. Thus light will have little effect. It is the same mechanism as carbon dosing.
    Yeah, you would imagine that the bacteria would at least need to produce pigments to be able to photosynthesise, and therefore be visible ( like cyano ). I definitely can't see 'em in my water.

  5. #25
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    I don't believe it is a case of the bacteria being photosynthetic and actual utilizing the light itself, it is just the preferential location to which they colonize under. My thinking is correct light spectrum is to some bacteria as the screen is to algae. Reading this picture below, it seems the bacteria are colonizing around algae cells at certain spectrums due to the chemical reaction taking place at the algae cell caused by the spectrum, so the light is making the algae produce the food source for the bacteria and that is why they group more around that spectrum. Since I am pretty sure the ATS screen is releasing tons of algae cells into the water, it seems like a perfect location to place a pump that would feed a bacteria bio-reactor. Again though, these are just thoughts in some very early stages of my experiments and as I progress my thinking may change completely.


  6. #26
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    The algae are photosynthesising more in the red and blue, thus giving off more DOC. The bacteria feed on the DOC.

  7. #27
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    Quote Originally Posted by SantaMonica View Post
    The algae are photosynthesising more in the red and blue, thus giving off more DOC. The bacteria feed on the DOC.
    Or oxygen, so it says on the picture description. Gonna stick with my skimmer and turbo modified it with an air pump, see what happens. I'm certainly producing lots of DOC for the bacteria to eat, hopefully I will be skimming some of both out.

  8. #28
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    Exactly.

    But the spectrums are slightly different it seems for algae growth vs bacteria growth. Algae uses more of the spectrum within the visual range (430nm/453nm/642nm/660nm), but bacteria seems to use reactions that are at the very ends of the visual scale (400nm/700nm). So what I am picturing is using the correct spectrum for algae growth over the screen where I want the algae to grow, and use the spectrum bacteria likes to process some of the algae cells that are floating in the water. I am thinking if it works like I hope, and I can fine tune the flow rate through a reactor, this will allow the bacteria to grow in population because the algae cells are providing all the food. The hope is as the algae cell enters the reactor the spectrum will allow it to give off the food initially, and then lack of other spectrums needed for the algae will lead it to die off in the reactor and be consumed before it exits. So the initial phase as the algae enters the reactor is to release carbon (docs), and the end phase before it exits is it dies and releases N/P, the other food source for bacteria. I would still use a skimmer as well, and have the output of the reactor into the skimmer intake just like one would do with bio-pellets. The reactor may turn into a dual stage type, where there is a large outter ring of clear tubing and an inner ring of black tubing so that there can be multiple types of bacteria within the reactor working together. Basically a more natural type of bio-pellet reactor that is more stable and easier to fine tune, utilizing things already in your system instead of adding an external food source. This way I can have the best of both worlds without harming either other, which is what happened when I tried bio-pellets in the past, it killed my ATS screen.

    The million dollar question is can this be used to selectively find a species of bacteria that has more of an affinity to phosphates since that appears to be the piece lacking in the majority of systems. It may turn out the lower spectrum (near UV) is the wrong direction and something like 700nm+ IR light actually the secret ingredient to grow phosphate loving bacteria, or it may turn out none of this is true and I am on the wrong path with my thinking that light spectrum is the answer. I want to find out if any of that may be true, and if so, what is the ideal spectrum(s) to accomplish my goal, which is to find a natural and sustainable method to keep phosphates under control. It doesn't seem that algae is the answer to that problem, but algae is an answer to many other problems so it is a good natural method for a lot of things, just not phosphate control in most closed systems.

  9. #29
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    http://aslo.org/lo/toc/vol_37/issue_4/0882.pdf

    If I am reading this right, this suggests the the ratio of phosphate uptake compared to nitrate is reduced when the carbon levels are increased. Ie without a skimmer, phosphate uptake is reduced !

    Not at all sure about this though so I'm gonna do more digging.

  10. #30
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    Right! been doing some bacterial research. Turns out the N:P ratio of marine bacteria is 9:1 which is slightly less than the Redfield Ratio. When bacteria are removed from the system, this should gradually reduce the phos levels at a faster rate than Algae. Could the reduction of phosphates compared to nitrates be this simple ?

    My test has shown there is no skimming effect when the screen has been cleaned, the skimming only kicks in when algae exudate reaches levels to cause bacterial population increase.

    http://bionumbers.hms.harvard.edu/bi...d=106710&ver=4

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