The only thing that bothers me is that it is just a few cm deep.. I am worried that this will not be sufficient... however.. I am stuck with this size scrubber.. 9cm by 11cm.. is the size of the bucket.. so it will be even less. I did make an airlift that works great.. the bubbles are now actually going in the scrubber instead of around it.. the bubbles enter in only 4 holes in the middle.. I added a lot of pictures to show what I came up with. I would like to get some feedback about it, if the design sucks please let me know.. i qm thinking of making a deeper scrubber to incease the surface area, but wonder if the lights would penetrate the bottom.
I also added the airlift because there are 2 glass walls on the sides (which devides the sump area in different parts).. so the airlift is below these 2 glass side panels else it would just circulate its own water..
Nice build. No really need for deeper unless you have lighting there. Growth on the top is going to only get a few cm thick anyway.
I will stick with the current set-up then.. and hope to get a lot of algae growing. Unfortunately I had an accident with the fist scrubber where I tried to scrape hair algae from the glass.. but I did not expect the hair algae to be so loosely attached.. eventually I ended up with a bunch of free floating algae in the sump area.. I scooped out most but when I turned on the pumps again, algae fragmens were blasted in the main tank.. so I got myself an algae breakout in the display tank.. I hope I can solve this with the scrubber.. although it is quite small. I added some 3mm polypropylene rope;
and attached this to the bottom of the knitting canvas with some fishing line.
I use 2 different type of leds.. 4x660nm+1x455nm led bulb.. and 5x full-spectrum led bulb.. maybe it works.. maybe not.. if not I will go with 660nm red only in the future.
My experience with algae scrubbers (both waterfall and upflow types) is that there are always bits of algae floating around in the main/display tank. If you're using a sump, you could run the return through a filter sock or something similar to catch it before it gets back into the main/display tank. I've never had any problem with algae growing in my main/display tanks, possibly because the lighting is not very good for algae growth. What little grows usually goes away on its own eventually since the scrubbers out-compete it for nutrients.
Thank you for your reply.. it took some time and I changed a few bits and pieces, but I there has been some growing going on. There have not been any pieces floating around as far as I can see, so far no complaints. I added the airstone again which silenced the scrubber a bit.. still some big bubbles every now and then.. but I guess I'll have to live with that.
The only thing that bothers me is that there is no growth on the strings? Why not? Maybe I used the wrong material?
Does hair algae not attach to polypropylene? Should I use a different matterial like nylon.. or just be patient?
PP is fine as long as it does not have anti-microbial additives. They will probably fill in later.
Thank you! I'll just sit and wait. I hope it will grow a good amount of algae to compete with the algae in the display tank. Unfortunately I still have a bunch of hair algae on the back of the glass and also on the substrate for some time now. It bothers me a bit. Maybe I should add a devider to the sump area? Right underneath the scrubber. If I can direct the water flow towards the scrubber, all of the water must pass the algae first. what do you think santa monica? In theory this will direct many times more water than the airlift.
You do not need much water flow at all. Just air bubbles.
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