ATS's have a big hurdle to over come?

I can't find it on BRS' site, . On their website (clearwater), I SMH. That's yet another website that just literally copy/pasted Santa Monica's "what is a scrubber" writeup. Word for word in some places. Example:

verbatim....that just gets me every time I see it.

Also, that's a variation of the 302 Aquatics scrubber, so nothing ground breaking design-wise. At least he uses a slot pipe, but he uses white PVC with is translucent, meaning it can grow algae inside the pipe. I switched to gray electrical PVC after about a week of using that pipe in my Rev 1 and then sent out replacement pipes to everyone, then switched to Schedule 80 when the slot started pinching.

The union he uses is huge and very likely has a restrictive throat on it, if it's the one I'm thinking of (one from a big box store) the flange on one side narrows the ID needlessly and cut the flow rate down, meaning you need a bigger pump to do the same job. I searched and found one manufacturer that does not add a needless flange on the inside.

Looks like he uses red/blue lights instead of WW like 302 does. Otherwise they're pretty much the same light. Although, they can't be LightingEver fixtures because they don't make red/blue. The LE fixtures are among the better LED floodlight fixtures, which isn't saying much because all of those type of fixtures are pretty much junk. I can't count how many people have told me that they get shocked by those eventually due to salt creep or poor grounding inside the fixture, cheap power supplies, etc (that encompasses all brands of that style of fixture, not only LE)

I could build that type of scrubber all day long and wholesale it to BRS if I wanted to. If you know how to work with acrylic, it's ridiculously easy to make a box like the 302 or clearwater design. When I made my Rev 1, one of the biggest things I wanted to do was block light. I thought this was a critical design feature, so I added a top flange and made it out of black acrylic. This adds a level of complexity to the design, to the point that even with CNC parts, I was having to sand after assembling the sides and windows so that I could add on the base and tops.

This light-blocking design requirement doesn't seem to be on the radar of the guys who make this type of design. 302 makes something that you slide over the end/fixtures to block the light, but it's huge (it has to be).

All I gotta say is, wait until my website is revamped...it's going to put any competitor's site to shame. The main reason it's taking me so long is that I have a extraordinarily huge amount of advice that I have disseminated over the course of the last 7 years, both over email on on various forums, and I wish to compile all of that into a huge FAQ & best practices section that covers both use of my units (all 4 revisions) as well as DIY.

Then, I'm working on a dynamic calculator that allows you to enter in all kinds of information about your system, then it spits out a recommendation on what size scrubber you need.

On top of that, my designer absolutely nailed my new logo design right on the head on the first try, without any input from me whatsoever.

 

lol...

 

I see that on their Twitter feed now. Looks like they've switched to Schedule 80 plumbing now, so that's good. Still can't tell what brand fixture they are using. I'm pretty sure that all those style fixtures are made by only a few manufacturers, and those are likely in China. But I think there are actually a few that are US based. Realistically though, all the parts are probably still made in China, what it comes down to is the quality of those parts and how they are assembled. The power supplies are super cheap, as are the LED multi-chips.

My power supply alone costs almost as much as one of those 20W LED multi-chip floodlights.

Next, look at the LEDs. one Luxeon Deep Red on a star is $2.25 retail Luxeon Deep Red. mulitply that by 6 per fixture and your raw LED parts cost is nearly the same as the entire multichip fixture.

One might say "wow that must be a great value" whereas the other might say "I wonder what corner they are cutting to make that so cheap".

You can't get tight bin selection and name-brand quality and ultra-inexpensive at the same time. My parts on my driver board aren't cheap either, most of them are made by Samsung actually (or another big name like that, I can't recall right now). So far, unless people just haven't been reporting failures, my LED/driver boards have something on the order of a 99% success rate. In 5 years, I've exchanged maybe 3 or 4 fixtures, mainly the older ones.

 

Offhand, I can't say that I disagree with any of the technical things he posts, but then again I haven't paid attention lately

Some disagree with the conclusions he draws or infers, saying there's a bit of cherry-picking of data going on. So that's mostly why I avoid quoting technical data & studies, there are just so many of those and a debate could go on forever. It's my feeling that most studies aren't directly applicable, for one reason or another.

What I do tend to disagree with is some of his advice. His is highly skewed towards the UAS concept, no surprise. Mine could be said to be skewed towards waterfall, no surprise either I suppose.

 

Algae does add things to the water, how these interact with the tank inhabitants, not sure. I'm sure there are studies that discuss it, I recall reading a few. I believe that most of the studies that were done directly on tanks with algae scrubbers on them were by Dr Adey, so horizontal dump-bucket style, turf algae, etc, and 20 years ago.

There's not much that I'm aware of that deals specifically with GHA on a waterfall or upflow scrubber

 

Can you expand a bit on Fe-EDDHA?

 

I was just going to ask if RHF had chimed in on that, and bam.

 

Yep I noticed that