Supporting scrubber via the drains

that's 7 days, I'm going to leave it, shoot for probably 14 for the palm swipe/rinse as it is starting to show signs of green inbetween the brown slime. Happy with the growth certainly. Can't wait to see the change in the tank in 4-6 weeks.

 

Progression:

 

How about some more progress shots. I was somewhat surprised to walk downstairs to find my Cyano almost all gone... I had noted it was getting darker (turning blackish?) but wasn't expecting a mass exodus. I was not home yesterday and didn't even look in the tank as I dropped food in for the morning and left, so it likely retreated over two days or so. I wasn't sure what to expect based on my 4-14 growth above, but I was certainly happy to see this when I pulled the screen just four days later:






I will palmswipe, rinse, and put the pin in tomorrow at 14 days. I have been trying to keep up on manual GHA removal in the DT to facilitate growth in the scrubber, it appears to be working!

 

Thanks for the advice Bud, I will do that.

 

Now at the 5 o'Clock position and running from 5 PM to 11 AM.

 

Had a little delay, just cleaned it today. Pre Cleaning:

 

7 days after first cleaning:





One end doesn't have as much water flow, the slot is clean etc, not sure why that might be.

 

Some direct feedback of the unit now that I've had it a while:

My odd mounting setup seems to work really well outside of the fact that I can't get rid of the bubbles on the drain. Since there is a horizontal plate on top of the drain any bubbles tend to make issues. I can solve this with some drain work I think, and I think the drain setup would work well outside my odd mounting setup.

That said, the unit itself would be nicer with a mounting system of some sort available. I would lean towards one that could be placed on the bottom of the sump (and adjusted up/down to keep scrubber height) or one that could hang off the side of my sump and adjust height up/down. Either would provide easier installation.

As others have noted the tubing for the feed line is a PITA. It certainly allows some flexibility and makes it so you don't have to be exact on hard pipe mounting but it has lifted my slot pipe out of the housing a couple times and has dictated where I put my feed pump since I can't get it formed how I want. I suggest you have the slot pipe hard plumbed (with your union) to a piece that is affixed to your base so you can run the flex line off that or hard pipe off that, it would avoid the issues I've had with the slot pipe, anyway. I will simply hard line mine off my return manifold once that's done.

The unit is very well built, I have had no quality issues and Bud includes every tool known to man to clean the screen etc. Great packaging, great controls etc. This is by far the best sorted unit out there, I would certainly buy it again.

 

And finally, so far, 4 weeks into running it I have harvested once and I can't say that I've seen any improvements (that stayed) in the GHA or Cyano within my tank. I do fully expect the scrubber to take longer than this to have an impact so I am not ruling it a failure, but timeline to seeing a change is also an important factor for some. For me it is not, as most things in this hobby take longer than we'd like.

I did have a couple days right prior to my first harvest where the cyano retreated and GHA was turning white/dying but it has come back with vengance. It could have been that feeding was lighter during that time or directly prior to it, etc etc. Either way, my tank is still growing plenty of Algae in the DT.