My algae scrubber

[Floyd R Turbo]

A video I made of roughing up a screen

Algae Scrubber Screen Rough-up Process - Quick and Easy - YouTube

 

[Dude1982]

Nice vid by the way floyd, Paul's tank looked great i skimmed through it but never saw the scrubber, ill read through the whole thread later on !

Edit: just seen his scrubber and doesn't look that different to mine thanks floyd, never seen anyone make one like mine above their tank.

 

[Dude1982]

As I'm only lighting mine with my main light unit with 2 54w 6500k t5s at the back and lit around 8 hours im going to be building a new light unit with a row of 20w spiral cfl's lit for 18 hours and change the bulbs every 3 month, I think this will work a lot better, I have been planning on doing this for a while but never got round to it yet !

 

[audifusion]

Not getting any growth yet.


I think my problem may be that I don't have a hard surface behind my screen to keep it rigid so right now it's kind of floppy.

What do you guys think ?

Should I put a piece of acrylic behind it?

 

[Floyd R Turbo]

Well horizontal screen are difficult at best to make work. I have read much about them and there are a few over on algaescrubber.net that have made them after much experimentation regarding how to make them work, and the bottom line is that they are just inherently inferior to vertical scrubbers or even UASs.

Also the LED light that you are using is probably not the best for an algae scrubber. LED Kelvin (K) ratings are meaningless for scrubbers, they are only provided for acrhitectural lighting when trying to achieve comparable look and feel of light color to MH or fluorescent sources. For algae you need a lot of red, and CFLs @ 2700K provide this. For LEDs you need a plant-growth specific wavelength, and that is 660nm. So your scrubber may grow OK eventually, but it will never really have that good of a filtration capacity.

Also, you need to have patience when it comes to growth. In FW, scrubbers start much faster - in just days. in SW, it takes weeks, up to 6, and that is under proper lighting and flow.

 

[audifusion]

I put a piece of glass under the screen .


I apparently do have algae growth on the screen, a nice green film and hairs growing like crazy.

With the glass underneath it, the flow is nice and even.

I'll wait a couple days and check it out

 

[audifusion]

Updates.....


Growth over the whole screen....

It's looking good. The last pic is when I first pit the screen in there.

One thing I wanted to ask, what colour should the growth be? I thought I had read somewhere that if the growth was brown then reduce te photo period? Not sure.

Looks like it's working though!!!!

 

[Dude1982]

I think any kind if growth on the screen is good as its not growing somewhere in your tank, I think browny black algae growth is due to high nutrients and when cleaned off a few times green will grow.
I went to b&q and got myself some drain pipe with end caps and made a light unit with 5 20w 2700k cfl's and my algae growth has been crazy and its working really well at competing with the algae in my tank !
Here's my light unit I made with drain pipe lol.

 

[audifusion]

How long should I wait to clean off the screen ??

 

[Dude1982]

I clean mine every week mate. I usually clean 2 screens a week then the other 2 the next week.

 

[audifusion]

just tested my water parameters.


Nitrates are at 0

Phosphate at 0.5

growth is looking amazing. A lot more green now.

re aquascaped too so I've been sifting my sand bed and getting a lot of waste out of there to be filtered out.

Not getting anymore hair algae growth in my DT

 

[audifusion]

going to buy a red led chip to go into my led floodlight housing.

 

[audifusion]

Growth is looking good, nice green hair algae, the whole screen is covered.

Water parameters are looking great, phosphate has dropped to almost undetectable.

Sifted most of my sandbed too by blowing it gradually with powerheads over the last week.

my skimmer is still running 24/7 , I wonder if I could just run the scrubber for a while?

 

[audifusion]

New growth pics.


Very green and thick.

Going to clean the screen this weekend.

Seems to be working

 

[Sniperhank]

Nice work on the scrubber.

 

[audifusion]

Check out this growth!


Very thick, I'd say a quarter inch at least, like a carpet.

Just cleaned it off and re installed in sump.

 

[audifusion]

Scrubber is working awesome, 0 nitrates 0 phos.... Love it