My name is Mark and I have been in this hobby for many years and have always had a problem with Algae. I currently have a 100 gallon Reef that I just set up downsizing from a 180. Currently really dont have an algae problem since I only have one clown fish in the tank. I run with a filter sock that I clean 2 times a week a Sump Buddy 40 skimmer that is on an external HP 20 pump. The skimmer is a downdraft style and it will just spit out foam if set to do so. Last I run TLF 150 reactor with a half cup of carbon and a cup of GFO. Have a Calcium Reactor that feeds the tank and makes life easy and I do about 5 gallon water change a week. Lighting is a Cebu Sun with 2 each ATI Blue Plus and 2 each ATI atinics. I converted the fixture to double ended bulbs and am running 250 watt Phoenix 14k bulbs on electronic ballasts. The tank has only been up a month since the conversion but am really happy with the size. Have followed this site for a while and have been on RC as a member since 2003. Would like to order a scrubber and cant decide which one. Its great to be a member and I really look forward to moving forward on getting a scrubber from Turbo.
Hello Mark, Welcome to the site! I've had many scrubbers over a few years and I think you have definitely landed at the right place. The L2 is the best scrubber I've owned. Hurricane Sandy was the ultimate test for the L2 and it worked like a charm. The first question is where do you want to go with your tank. I'm sure you are not going to keep just the one fish, so first you have to know what your livestock in the future will be so that you can plan accordingly. If you are looking to get a good number of fish and expect to feed 3-4 cubes a day I would recommend getting and L3 or L4. If you plan on keeping just a few fish and will feed one cube of food a day or less, then an L2 seems to do the job fine.
Ricky, Thanks for the Reply. Yes would like to add some fish if nothing else at least a nice tang and a cleaner shrimp. On your L2 how many fish do you have and do you feed just a cube a day ? Have you noticed any heat increases to your tank from the LED's on your L2. Are you running a skimmer with your L2 ? TIA
Welcome Mark I run an L2 on a mixed reef 120g with 6 chromis, yellow tang, melanarus wrasse, bangii cardinal, clown goby, 2 clowns, and a green mandarin. Tank is mainly softies but a few SPS and LPS. I feed roughly 2 cubes but only every other day because the food is a DIY and is pretty potent. The only algae I get is on the glass. Also it's sumpless, which I have found does not handle bioload as well as a system with a sump. I also run an L2 on a customer's 144 w/sump which has a 5" blue tang, 4" yellow tang, 6" sailfin tang, clown, 12" engineer goby, a 5" angel, 3" damsel, 2" chromis (yes, he's huge) and I'm sure I'm forgetting a fish in there, but that one is fed about 2 cubes/day 5 days/week and has no tank algae and they clean the glass once maybe twice a week. I have an L4 on a customer's 200 that has 9" vlamingi tang, 6' blue tang, 4" yellow tang, 7" naso tang, about 10 scissortail damsels, 2 clowns, a pajama cardinal and a few other small fish, lots of 'easy' corals, and that tank also runs a Reef Octopus 150 skimmer, a filter sock, and infrequently changed carbon/GFO in a BRS reactor and it does fantasic. He feeds rather sparingly considering the load but has no tank algae at all either.
Bud Watched in 2012 on Youtube the LA fish guys installing the L2 the recent update was nothing but amazing on how well the L2 was performing. Really impressed with your contributions to this Hobby. Figured I would take a crack at reading all 100 plus pages on RC again and its quite a read. Torn between the L2 and the L3 do you think it would just be over kill for me on the L3 since I really dont plan on that many fish ? Is their much more heat generated by the L3 vs the L2 ? Its looking like the L2 is maybe all I would ever need. Thanks
The L3 is not a big seller compared to the L2 or L4, because of the price differential I think mainly, but also now because the HF model allows you to increase the flow to a much higher level in the L2 such that it can filter more. 2 cubes/day is really the baseline amount that the L2 is designed to filter for, but I have people feeding heavier than that and getting good filtration. Each tank and situation is different so I hesitate to say that it is "guaranteed" to filter more if you push more water through it and add to the light intensity/photoperiod, but in most cases you can push it to overperform if needed. I would say the L2 fits your situation well for now and probably would for quite a while. As you grow out your tank and add more corals and fish, the overall tank dynamic will change and this might require some additional filtration depending on what you stock it with. For instance, if you start going heavy into SPS you might find that a small skimmer or running carbon might be the way to go, and this would pick up part of the bioload. If other filtration devices were rated based on feeding, then you could just do the math but that's generally not the case, at least not right now - most devices are specified for a given volume of water, which does make sense in some cases such as very large tanks. For heavily stocked tanks (corals or fish) I tend to recommend some kind of co-filtration, but it can be moderately sized. Use the scrubber as primary filtration, and everything else is secondary. Also I have found that scrubbers tend to perform best in tanks with a variety of life (corals, fish, inverts, etc) which is why they tend to start up fast on established tanks and tend to ramp up very slowly on brand new tanks. Some argue that this effect is because established tanks have a lot of "stuff" to "pull out", and this might be the case in some systems, but my experience leads me to believe that biodiversity is a factor in scrubber growth/success, because I have had consistent growth over the long term on several tanks, meaning (to me) that the scrubber isn't really pulling anything out of the established tank anymore, it's more or less synchronized with the system.
I had a number of fish, but I have never fed more than 1 cube a day. In my opinion one cube is a lot of food. The only time when I feed more than one cube is when I feed my tangs some nori. But then who knows how many "cubes" nori is. When I had the Lion and the Eel I did feed the lion 3-4 Damsels a week and 5 silversides a week to the eel. That I guess was way more than 2 cubes and the scrubber still did very well. Also, It seems like the new high flow Idea works better, so does this mean an L2 Can really now handle 3-4 "cubes?.. So you see where I'm getting at? I run a skimmer and carbon. But I did run scrubber only for a year and the l2 had no problem handling the load. My suggestion is start with the L2 and monitor your nutrient levels as your bio-load increases.. then you can take it from there.
