Lion-O's Surf2 Thread

What Turbo said.

I'm not bothered in the least. I've always been pretty supportive of SM, and I maintain that he has done more than anyone to promote and develop algae filtration, but once he started banning people for disagreeing with him, he lost me, and when I found that he'd prevented people from PMing on his site. that was it. A shame, but there it is.

Can I have my "banned from Algaescrubbers" badge now?

 

The red slime one?

I used that once. Got rid of the red stuff but almost immediately afterwards I started getting nuisance green hair algae everywhere, which took 18 months or so to get rid of by scrubbing.

My advice by the way is to get rid of that Surf thing, which I suspect has limited function as a filter and to build yourself a DIY scrubber using plans from here or the AS site. Pretty much anything that has a rough surface, strong light and water flowing over it will work.

 

Oh yeah, and lots of herbivores help too. I suggest Mexican turbo snails (have to make sure they're the proper ones though, "Turbo fluctuosa") and also a tuxedo urchin or two.

 

Which of those does the SURF scrubber not fulfill?

 

In my experience with various kinds of scrubbers over the last 2 years, a waterfall scrubber works best for a larger system. Yes, the surf type seems to work OK for keeping nitrates under control, but they seem to be limited because of lack of water circulation.

Of course, we are not just growing algae here, but trying to use this method to reduce phosphates and Nitrates in our systems. Sometimes when we measure Nitrate at 0 and Phosphates at 0 we forget that the algae growing in our system [usually the bad stuff we don't want in places we don't want it] are using it up.

The original algae scrubbers were the waterfall type, proven technology. The other stuff does work in systems that have issues with space and so on, but not as well.

I'm currently doing an ongoing experiment using a waterfall scrubber to overcome hair algae in my DT. Not to hijack your thread here, but hopefully the results of that will be useful to everyone here.

I plan on starting a separate discussion on that and posting pics along the way.

 

Well, not having tested one, I wouldn't want to pin it down to specifics, but my main contention is that as far as I can see, it doesn't bloody work!

 

Hi all,

Sorry for the delay in response, we went out of town for the long weekend. Hopefully I answer all the questions...

I have several nerite snails, some cerith/nassarius, a tuxedo urchin, and hermit crabs in my display.

For bubbles I have the fusion 700 air pump from JW pet. It's the one that santamonica recommended with the surf scrubber. I feel like his scrubber works it just has not worked for me. And I really don't know why. I got green growth at first, but now just the orange slime (very little green growth does remain however). I was thinking maybe it was a result of not getting enough water flow as well, because there are only the two entrance bubbles and the exit holes. If i put it under the faucet and just run it, it has trouble keeping up with the flow of the faucet.

I have only tried 18 hour and 22 hour photoperiods. I do run it reverse though, so its off when the tank lights are on for a little while, and on while the display lights are off. I have not tried a nylon filter.

I currently am running without the filter media and filter sock for the next 14 days (just did a cleaning). I'll take new pics 14 days from now. I'm thinking the next thing I'll try is reintroduce the filter sock... I don't like the idea of having a filter sock in there, but it did grab a lot of junk and shouldnt be too harmful as long as I clean that sock weekly. Frankly, I think my skimmer kinda sucks because the skimmer on my large tank skims way more skimmate with 0 fish and feedings than my skimmer does in my little elos with 5 fish. So, the sock comes in handy and gets quite brown by the end of the week.

 

I have not tried that, but I can try it next Right now, its simply on for 19-22 hours , then off for the remainder of the day.

 

Seems the sizing advice has been changed with uppy flowy scrubbers. if you glue a few strings in it apparently it turns it into a double sided scrubber LOL

http://algaescrubber.net/forums/sho...rrent-guidelines&p=35160&viewfull=1#post35160

"FLOATING SURFACE SCRUBBERS WITH RIBBONS: Screen size is the size of the box (Lenth X Width), and is 2-sided because the ribbons grow in 3D."

 

Not much progress with the current track.

In a 24 hour period, one of my long time corals (blue hawkins echinata http://www.liveaquaria.com/images/categories/product/p-38899-hawkins-echinata.jpg) went from completely blue to completely bleached. This confused me, and I thought it was probably just the algae surrounding it in the tank. However, all the other corals still doing fine.

Just over the last week, a few of my pulsing xenia have started to degrade in health. So I've added back in my filter sock and filter media.

Anyway, going to try the two 6 hour photo periods now and will post new results in a week or two. The surf does have posted on it that you should do smaller photoperiods if the growth is "yellow" so I guess that would apply to me. Wish me luck!

 

Here are some photo updates. Sorry for the delay, wife decided we should go camping for the long weekend so I did not take pics when I wanted to

Pics were taken before and after cleaning (fairly obvious which is which). Growth is still very slimy, but at least it is looking more green to me... Also, fun fact - that starfish was clinging to the bottom of the container. Biggest one I have ever removed from my tank. Felt bad for the little big guy!

 

Originally, I did get all green (that nice forest green color...), but it never grew out. It just remained a thin layer on all the edges and strings.

It probably ran like that a few months. Then I think it went to **** when I went on a 6 week vaca.