Hi everyone
I just discovered this forum and seems to be a great place to get more info for my new project.
Over the lest few days I been working on adding a algae scrubber to the system. I use to have one installed running for about 6 months or so and it worked fine . It was installed between my frag tank and the refugium, it was running on the drain line from my frag tank water falling on the refugium. The problem with that setup was that some of the hair algea the was growing on the scrubber was falling on top of my chaeto and soon enough started taking over. Didn't take to long for the hair algae to pretty much take over in the refugium and kill most of the chaeto algae, also hair algea prety much covered everything in the frag tank too.
I decided to clean everything up and start fresh. I removed the scrubber, threw away the chaeto and scrubbed all the hair algae from everywhere. To some degree not the best of decisions as my phosphates went up quite a bit soon after that and also did my nitrates, a problem I didn't have in a long time.
I added some new chaetoe to the fuge again so I got it started. Still slightly battling to remove all the exes nutrients so I decided to add the scrubber again but this time a different design. Im using my old frag tank as the housing for the scrubber and I will be adding a 4'' sock in the scrubber tank drain so no hair algae will be leaching back to the refugeum, at least thats the plan ....
Now this time around I will be building a LED fixture for both the sides of the scrubber, before my scrubber was running on home depot reflectors and fluorescent bulbs.
As you can see in the pictures my scrubber is L shaped with 18'' x 8'' main screen and 8'' x 8'' side screen. Im not sure if I will need them both to be running but the main side will be running it for sure. I am planing on using 14 3w Philips Rebel ES 660nm Deep Red LED and 3 3w Philips Rebel ES Royal Blue LED 440-450nm in each side of the scrubber totaling to 81w as you can see in the drawing.
Am I in the right track or you see something not making much sense? Should I add more Blues? Should I use both my screens or the main one is enough?
Here are some pics of the build ...
http://s1286.photobucket.com/user/Mo...5950d.jpg.html
http://s1286.photobucket.com/user/Mo...69a77.jpg.html
http://s1286.photobucket.com/user/Mo...tml?sort=3&o=0