New Santa Monica RAIN2 Algae Scrubber

You're well past that stage - basically, it's somewhat decent GHA attachment. If you have growth that stays attached after you rub/rinse, you're there.

Maturity is another thing, that's a stage where you get reliable growth that can actually perform filtration / reduce nutrients - the kind of growth where you have to scrape or harvest in some other fashion. You're inbetween those 2 stages IMO

 

Can you hook each light up to separate timers and run each 12 hrs or something?

 

Flow seems decent enough but more is probably not going to hurt anything.

It would be ideal if you could alternate lighting each side but I understand that might not be possible without 2 power supplies, IIRC the SM units come with a splitter of some sort so that you can run 1-4 lights off one power supply, so the best you can do with one power supply is switch sides manually, which is kind of a pain but you might try lighting one side one day, the other side the next day, etc and see if that makes any difference over the course of a week.

More of a pain would be switching the plug daily, if you can do that I would do 9 hrs/day on each side. If you just switch once daily I might try 12 hrs/day so one side gets 12 hrs one day, the other 12 hrs the next day.

If it just seems stagnant, then there might be something else going on. You can always try to kick-start growth by adding an iron supplement to the system, like Kent Iron & Manganese, or Flourish Iron. That's a temporary fix, I wouldn't recommend dosing that long term - that's just from a cost perspective...the algae should grow without needing to constantly dose iron

 

I would run 12 hrs/day, opposite the DT

 

running opposite the DT lights helps maintain pH, also you aren't fighting the tank algae for nutrients so there might be some logic to running opposite the DT lights.

Normally fuge lighting is done opposite the tank lights as well so this is not a new philosophy

 

Well I think of it like this: your DT lighting isn't idealized for algae growth, but the scrubber is. So if you let the scrubber be the only one getting a crack at the nutrients, it should do slightly better when it's not competing for the nutrients with the DT lighting, even though the DT lighting is not as effective for growing algae.

When they are both running, there is a split of the nutrient absorption. When both lights are off, there is nothing to prevent nutrients from building up during the down time. Granted that this is a short period of time.

One thing to consider is shortening the DT photoperiod in addition to running the scrubber opposite the tank cycle. Many people run DT lights to their schedule, not the tank schedule. If you have corals, running an 8 hour daily cycle is enough. If you have controllable lights or multiple circuits so that you can ramp up/down, you should only run 100% peak for a few hours/day, then ramp up/down on either side.

So I guess this begs the questions: what are your tank's coral contents, and what is your DT light cycle like?

 

Do you have corals? If so, what kind? I don't need a specific list, just a general breakdown so I have an idea of how heavy your coral load is

 

Here's what I would do:

Blues on 10am-6pm max
Whites on noon-2pm
Scrubber 8pm-8am (both lights)

Feed fish at 5:30pm and minimize feeding

See how things go after 2-3 weeks of this cycle

 

If you mean shift the start/end times so that it ends at the same time, etc - yeah