Is any one using an algae scrubber and mechanical filtration only on a fresh water tank.
Is any one using an algae scrubber and mechanical filtration only on a fresh water tank.
I ran a fresh water tank with no filtration other than algae and gravel. Ammonia, nitrate, and nitrite were all undetectable, but mechanical filtration, it's not effective. Beyond not really capturing anything mechanical, small pieces of algae will break off the screen and enter the tank/sump. Especially when you clean the screen. My second scrubber I placed filter floss down stream of the scrubber. I don't run the floss all the time, usually only a day or two a week to polish the water.
I am considering using a 90 gallon, 4' x 20" x 20" as a sump, and baby fry nursery, for a 75 gal, over stocked, and well fed african mbuna tank.
It will be a DIY. I was thinking of a fluidised sand filter, as a back up, too a large waterfall algae scrubber. I am thinking it would absorb most of the ammonia before it could convert into nitrate.
Currently my water goes through a bioball W/D before it goes to the scrubber. My current set up mostly limits my fry space. Also a green algae scrubber could provide a lot of copods, waterfleas. The fry could feed on.
New question.
Will a scrubber work best before any bio media? I have a potential location for a 8" x 20" flat river scrubber with 600 gph flow. I think I need 4xx more light.
I am mostly curious as to the pre or post, biofilter, feeding it ammonia, vs nitrate.
Should not matter where anything goes.
starting out with a well cleaned screen. I like the fact that the scrubber grows 100+ daphnia, copods, with each cleaning. I don't know how the hold out in a waterfall. They do.
48 hours of growth. Nitrates have gone up to 30 ppm since I cleaned it.
Let it get get real thick this time.
I hope too. I felt it was still growing a CFL started non green algae.
Before I gave it a good hard scrub, the green spot was the center of the old cfl.
The bare spot was 2" from a light, rearanged light spread, and doubled the water flow. Added more air, also as scrubber is inside a wet dry sump with a lid.
I have an ufs on my top tank, it seams to be greener and going better than the wfs, the wfs has a huge bio load vs the ufs.
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