Marty's L2 Scrubber on a 54 gallon corner tank

Hey guys,

I wanted to use this thread to document my first dive into an ATS. I'm currently running the scrubber for 2 hours on and 2 hours off for a total of 10 hours. Flow is turned back to about 60% on a rio 1100. As of today, my Nitrate is 0 and my phoshpate is .042. Hopefully these will be "Before" pictures




Here's some pictures of the setup, you can see why the skimmer had to come out.

 

I had a little trouble getting the pictures on, so let me know if they're better as attached thumbnails or inline with the text. I had more I tried to put in the text, but it kept freezing during upload.

 

Hey Bud, That's just the first week. I did a light rinse in tap water and cleaned out the slot and put it back in. still running for 2 hours on, one off for a total of 10 hours. How long should I wait for the next cleaning?

 

sounds good, its at around 75%-80% right now. should I crank the flow all the way to 100%?

 

so, on second look, I was dialed down to about 35%-40% of flow on the rio. I increased it this morning to closer to 75%-80%. I'll keep you posted on changes in growth.

 

Here is my Week 2 update. Lightly rubbed with fingers again and rinsed. cleaned the PVC slot as well. The algae in the display is still growing like crazy, so I haven't given up my weekly harvest there, but I have seen that it takes longer for the algae to build on the glass.

 

okay, The lights now turn on at 9pm and off at 8am in one long photo period. what is the key to know if I need longer or shorter, and how many hours does a mature screen normally end up at?

 

Okay guys,

Here are theweek three growth pictures. I'm amazed at how much more growth i'm getting already. I'm not sure if it's from the combined photo period of 11 hours, or just the screen maturing, but either way, this is going so much better than my HOG .5 UAS experiment, I couldn't be happier. I turned the flow all the way up this morning, since the algae I cleaned off I really had to scrape at with a credit card to get off. It's also pretty dark algae, so I'm not sure if I should increase my photo period, or if I should just run with the higher flow this week so i'm not changing too much stuff at once. I'm open to suggestions.

 

Okay guys, here is the pictures from week 4. A LOT more growth this week. I took a picture of both sides since the colouration was so different on each side. The differences from week 3 to week 4 was higher flow (60% increased to 75%) and two more hours of light to get up to 13 hours on in one block. Since cleaning the screen (which was just scraping with a credit card and rinsing, and cloeaning the slot portion with a tooth brush) I've increased the flow to 85%. I think that is as high as I'll ever run the flow as any more and it's noisier than I want to have in that room. Any thoughts on lights? increase or decrease? Oh, and my nitrates are still undetectable, and phosphate is running a little bit higher at .06132.



okay, scratch that, I can only get one of the pictures to upload. but the other side is the same density of growth, but it doesn't have the light part in the middle, its all the same dense color that you see on the sides of this photo.

 

Okay, it's working better today. Here is the other side of the screen, still from week 4.

 

Hey Floyd,

its the sound of running water in the box itself. like the splashing as the water comes off the screen and hits the water above the false bottom. Maybe the problem is that I don't have it tuned properly. Yeah, I have the ball valve on it, and the drain itself is silent, but I'm probably not able to tune it as sensitivley because of the ball valve I used.