Luis's L2 & Tanks

Starting a thread on behalf of one of my clients who routinely sends me pics via phone. His growth is great and he's trying some different techniques. He started out with a scrubber that came with the setup he was running but it was struggling to grow algae, and tank algae was taking over. He purchased one of the original (Rev 1) L2's and get great growth right off the bat by cutting up his old screen into strips and securing it to the new screen. After a few weeks he took the old strips off and his growth has been nothing short of phenomenal since then.

He transferred everything to a new, larger setup and added a skimmer and biopellet reactor about a month ago, I think. So this is a good example of how to run a multi-tiered filtration system using smaller than recommended sized filtration systems which add up and work together. There are still questions about whether this works well or not so well, because as most people know, when you radically change too many things, you can have problems no matter what you do. By radically change, I mean moving everything from one system to another which involves removing rock from the water and exposing it to air and changing the flow patterns, both of which mess up the periphyton (sponges, bacteria) and then switching from scrubber-only to multiple filtration, and probably changing lights or at least intensity/coverage of lights due to the tank change.

But regardless of all of that - his scrubber growth is something to envy. I should note that he puts a ton of flow through - well over 400 GPH. I believe he feeds direct from overflow now, and says he thinks it is >500 GPH.

So here are pics starting with September 2012

9/8 5 days growth (from bare screen, with strips from old screen)



9/9 6 days





9/12 3 days after 1st cleaning



9/15 6 days growth



9/16 7 days growth











9/22 Week 3 Day 5





9/23 2 day after cleaning



10/2 cleaning - week 4



He is still, after this growth, having tank algae issues (before tank change)

10/7



11/17 harvest

 

11/21 pics















I had been working with him to figure out what is causing this - testing, light times, cycles, etc. I've seen other examples of tanks leeching and figured this was what it was. It was getting better, going through various stages. Sounded to me like the tank was re-balancing and algae was taking hold. This tends to happen when the system is not long-term stable.

About that time (end of November to mid December) he changed tanks. Here is the new tank as of 12/22, which I believe is a 180



Filtration pics









12/22 harvest









12/29 harvest

 

2013

1/5







In the last pic, you can see what he's noticing now - it appears to be die-off in the lower layers of growth. He noticed this last week. I told him to either up the light hours on the scrubber, or remove the diffusers. He is going to remove the diffusers. My thought is that he needs deeper penetration to the lower layers when getting this thick of growth.

Hopefully Luis will join the site and make a few comments about his setup and what he has experienced and also I invite anyone to comment!