Hello, I have a 75g drilled tank, 30g tank for a sump. The tank has been running for about 13 years. It's lightly stocked, right now one clownfish (whose buddy of 12 years just passed away) and one yellow tail blue damsel. There's a green bubble tipped anemone that's been in there since the beginning, it's since split numerous times, I counted ten the other day. Red Monti that grows like weeds, colt coral that also grows like weeds, mushroom coral, and blue acro, along with an urchin and sand sifting sea star. Water movement is a Tunze wavebox and one turbelle stream. Filtration is a diy protein skimmer driven. Lighting is a current USA T-5 six lamp fixture. I don't do much testing. I've experimented with refugiums and growing chaeto in the sump, which worked well except the fan in the led light became so noisy my wife made me shut it off. Since then all the algae has migrated back to the DT. So my new initiative is to get a algae scrubber up and running. The slotted tube is clamped to a piece of acrylic that hangs from the top of the sump, it is fed from the durso stand pipe in the overflow which is 220 gph, the screen is 6" wide and 8" long. This is the light Procyon 17" - 2017 Model, and is 12" away from the screen, photoperiod is on 18, off 6. It's been running for one week, and I'm seeing a greenish hue to the screen. My next move is to shield the rest of the sump from the light. Anyway let me know what you think please. Hopefully the pics are able to be seen. Thanks!
Welcome to the site! Nice setup, 15 years but only 2 fish? I'm guessing you don't feed much, so the screen is probably a bit large. But the light is very far away and it's one-sided, so that de-rates it quite a bit. So it'll work. Keep in mind the things you read about frequency of cleaning and growth rates can be quite different based on the setup. Right now, you could probably get away with a very small screen and light, like 4x4 and a small PAR type lamp, so going a bit larger with a more powerful light (but further away) is doing about the same thing. See how it goes!
Thanks for the critique Turbo! I think it's going to work. Yes, actually there were 3 fish, one of the clowns died recently. Major bummer. But I've had some yellow tangs on and off, can't seem to get them to live more than a couple years, so I've stopped having them. Great for algae control they are.
Here we are day 14 I'm cleaning the screen with a toothbrush this stuff does not want to come off. I gave it a good rinsing and put it back together.
That's good, because you actually don't want to get any of it off, unless there is clear/yellow/dark slime, and that usually rinses off after you rub it with your fingertips. For probably the first month or two, you want to only do gentle cleanings, or rather, harvests. You want to leave as much attached growth behind as possible so the holes of the screen can fill in. You never really want to scrub the screen clean, so do things like: - rub with fingertips under room temp tap water - "drag" a soft toothbrush over the screen, making just a single pass over each area, then rinse - as growth starts to get thicker and more firmly attached, "drag" a plastic scraper similarly, one pass then rinse - don't scrub hard with a stiff bristled brush, or "chisel" with a scraper until the "drag" method doesn't remove enough If the whole mat of algae easily detaches when you use the scraper-drag method, you may have gone too lone between harvests. Usually the screen will be pretty clean after this, with a bit of a "stained" look. This is OK but you will want to let it grow back in well and maybe do an intermediate harvest halfway through your growth period, where you just rub & rinse and that's it. Once you start getting thicker growth, you can extend hours, if you need to. Remember, the growth amount and type are less important than how your tank is doing (nusiance algae, nutrients, etc)
Yes, not a problem. Sometimes that a sign of a high level of photosynthesis - oxygen is a product of that process
here you can actually see the difference between where I scraped off the lit side versus the unlit side
Considering that you only have one fish and probably don't feed that much, that's decent growth. I would probably be doing intermediate harvests ever 14 days or so instead of letting it go 4 weeks - very very light, just rub with fingertips while rinsing
