Reckon this will work?

Yup, which of course is to be expected. Algae tending to do best in areas of higher flow/turbulence.

I'm quite encouraged by the fact that the GHA is sprouting across the tiles though, even in areas with the least flow.

 

Another week in. Phosphate test showing zero again now

 

Another week - P showing zero again (but I tested mid week and it read 0.04 which seems strange)

Time to part clean or let it grow? Think I'll let it carry on for a bit.

 

Cheers Garf. It seems pretty firm at the moment. I'll leave it for a while longer.

 

Took the tiles out today and had a look. Going away for a week so decided to clean the fullest one and leave the other. Drained yield was 33g.

Happy New Year everyone.

 

Thanks. But it's taken a month to get to this stage, since the last cleaning.

P tests are a bit up and down but not of any concern.

Jury's still out on this I think but it seems to going the right way.

 

Back from my trip. 8 days since scraping one side and there's a fair bit of regrowth




So decided to scrape the other side, drained yield was 82 grams

 

Cheers Garf, I've always liked a young scrubber when I can get one

I'm not sure that it's going to grow a lot quicker than this really unless I feed more, which is unnecessary.

Phosphate is in check (o,o3 today and it yo-yos between zero and 0.04) and there's no nuisance algae in the DT, still clean the glass once a week or so but that's all.

I used to get about 25g a week from my last waterfall and that kept things in check for 6 months or so, this thing gave 32g in 4 weeks from one side and 82g in 5 weeks from the other so I think it's working out about the same.

An older scrubber that I had used to yield a lot more but I had a lot of old sand in the tank at that time which I think was holding a lot of muck (it stank to high heaven when I took it out anyway).

I think I'll let it grow now until P starts to rise or until the algae starts to come off on it's own, just to see what happens.

 

About a months growth on this, last cleaning was 9th Jan, so 30 days total.




Phosphate is showing 0.04 which is the upper extent of it's recent range so I think I need to clean it now.


EDIT - Final update, cleaned it and the drained yield was 165 grams (5.8 ounces), which is a little more than I would expect from this tank in the time frame.

I think this thing is pretty much proven now so I won't bother with any further updates.

 

Still CFL spots. The LED lamp I ordered was made wrong and the Chinese manufacturer is refusing to discuss it further.

I will change it to LEDs at some point though.

 

Yes, but not particularly fast flow, 800-ish litres per hour across a width of 6 inches or so and a depth of 2 inches doesn't exactly blow it around.

And there's only 30 watts of warm white CFLs

No idea if warm white LEDs would do the same thing as I haven't tried. The consensus seems to be though that you'd be better off with LED grow lights, which is what I will do when I get around to it.

 

You're welcome

 

No other filtration aside from live rock. Although I do have a lot of Kenya Trees at the moment as they have gone growth crazy lately which will be using up some nutrients. I'm intending to remove a lot of that shortly though.

And yes I need to tweak the regularity of cleaning, but it's kind of nice to be able to do it just once a month and still maintain water quality.