Long story short: my tank got mostly wiped out after Hurricane Sandy and no power for 2 weeks. I was able to salvage my more prized pieces after about a week of cold water conditions, and they mostly survived. They were being watched for at a LFS.
So, new tank, new build, new ideas. The prior tank had a functional DSB, and so will this one. An algae scrubber seems like a perfect complement, after all a DSB needs lots of food, maybe more than a few fish. I also like NPS (Dendros) and filter feeders (feather worms) so I like to dump plankton and decapsulated artemia regularly.
I never ran a skimmer previously because I felt it better to keep the goodies in the water. I used phosban, chemipure, purigen and Xport in reactors to help control nutrients. I also had Chaeto in the sump that I used for export. For the most part, nutrient control was OK, but of course I had to deal with the typical nuisance algae like Valonia up the wazoo...but that was the price to pay for heavy feeding, or so I thought. Then came the discovery of an algae scrubber, and seemingly my problems may have been solved.
I am still just into week 3 of my new tank, but my scrubber is up and running 2 days now, ever since the diatom bloom was evident. I intend on slowly building up the scrubber, letting it evolve as my system evolves. It is lit from one side only for now, but it is ready to have double light at any time. I am not going to start feeding heavily until more inverts and sand critters are introduced, so I will take it at a leisurely pace.
I haven't seen too many algae scrubber threads from day 1 of a new tank cycle, so if nothing else this should at least be a little more interesting than other stories here. I designed it using the typical waterfall build, with PVC and elbows from Home Depot and plastic canvas from Michael's. My pump is a Maxijet 1200, plenty of power for the 6+ inches of waterfall width. The DT is 39-gal and the sump is 12-gal so not counting rock and sand there is probably about 40-gal total water volume.
The light is a 50W UFO style LED array, 8:1 ratio 660nm: 450nm. There are 50 diodes @ 1W power each. I chose this over the 25x3W option because I felt the light would be too powerful the other way. But still, there is plenty of wattage, man is it bright. The fixture is 6 inches round, similar in size to a smoke detector. I have a diffuser in front to defocus the intensity and protect it from splash. It is about 3-4 inches away from the canvas. The optimum light covers an area roughly 6x6 inches, which if/ when lit from both sides along with the wattage will be more than adequate for my system.
Shower curtain rings suspend the canvas.
Flow is excellent and surprisingly quiet and evenly spaced.
Diffuser sheet in place.
Day 2, already some diatoms are sticking.
That is all for now.
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Originally Posted by Garf
