Try again: Is anybody running an algae scrubber as primary filter.

[gonereefin']

Hey Kent: Old threads never die, well, who knows but anyway,,,,
What I wanted to mention was that I had a chance to meet the owner of Inland Aquatics this fall, it was he and his partner, a Mr. Adey, who had the patent on algal turf scrubbers Well, the guy I met (can't remember his name right now) was telling me that this winter the ATF may be back available (Bitter lawsuit nearly ruined them both). I've never been back in touch with him but I'm hoping that they are or will be available sometime soon. They were excellent products. As a note, back when I was reading about them, they would clean just about anything you put to them given it was large enough and you took care of the turf. And from what I remember, they don't even have to be that large.
FYI
Randy

[bergzy]

well,

ever since i put on my 5 gallon fuge/lsb/algae-grower/scrubber/copepod/amphipod growing factory i have noticed an increase in coraline algae growth, increased coral polyps extension, almost no skimmer guck, increased water clarity and more active fish.

when i did my 10g nano in 1994 (before i think there was a term for 'nano'), i put in caulerpa and it just grew and grew creating all the same tank properties that i mentioned with my present tank.

it appears that it is doing an incredible job. for me, it seems that size doesn't matter. what i think makes the difference is my 65 watts of 6500k pc (loa from costco).

now, the skimmer is on the same timer as the main lights are.

for me, nothing man made even comes close to mother nature.

[Flatlander]

Hi guys. Good thread. Seems familar to me.

Yes, mine is still running. Its on my 225g mixed reef. I was running my Euroreef in the sump also, but its now gone. I,m watching the tank close to see how it does on the scrubber only. My scrubber is the large one Inland use to sell, but my tanks large also. I have a 32in. modified MR3 on standby.

This pic of my scrubber, is an old one, running on a sump temporary. It now gets its feed direct from the tank and dumps back into the same.

[scot]

I've been running a home made ATS, dump bucket, for over a year and a half. My tank is a 100 gal all SPS, packed with corals and quite a few fish. So far I love it. I get geat growth and color out of the corals, and it's easy to maintain. The life in the sand bed, etc is better than any other tank I've ever had. The tank and sump have deep sand beds and I always run carbon. I pull more frags out of the tank than can be sold to the LFS.

I don't follow Adey's system, I use the standard practices found here on Reef central. Ca reactor, drip kalk, carbon and use the ATS for nutrient export, NO SKIMMER. It's been the best system I've ever set up in about 15 years of reef keeping.

[DougSupreme]

could I set up my fuge as an ATS by installing a "screen" just below the high water level, and utilizing a solenoid operated valve on the drain side of the fuge? The drain would have a higher flow rate than my supply pump therefore changing the water level by an inch or so depending on the cycle time setup for the solenoid valve.

[Kent E]

Thanks for the replys, it is very encouraging.

I don't follow Adey's system, I use the standard practices found here on Reef central.

Scot, could you please elaborate the above. I dont know the differences between Adleys system and standard practices of Reef Central.

I was running my Euroreef in the sump also, but its now gone. I,m watching the tank close to see how it does on the scrubber only.

Doug how long have you been skimmerless? Thats bold with a large tank. Is it heavily stocked?

I currently have no skimmer or algal scubber on a 75, I'm becomming nervous but what I can gather skimmers don't seem to be the best answer. They seem to take out the good and bad but not all of either. That is why I'm gathering info on scubbers.

[Frick-n-Frags]

Boy, what's with you guys digging up all these ancient crazy threads??????

I read it through, what a nice reminder of what my original aim was with this setup and pretty much staying the course.

I probably should help it out by explaining where I am right now.
I have learned a few things

I took my skimmer offline about this time 3 years ago. It was off for a while when I started this thread.
life was great until this summer. I put my skimmer back online a month ago because of several things:

The water was getting like thick for lack of a better word.

My algae experiment was an incredible success. I have easily 25 different species of algae that I can pick out. In fact, it was too successful.
Macros or micros, thay all grow on everything. They all suck around the corals.

Last Xmas I got fish #2, a weird like spotted hawkfish and effectively doubled the few flakes of fishfood I originally had put in since forever.

Over time feeding the new fish I upped feeding Bowser and upped the flakes even more because of now feeding maybe 4 days a week

I lost like 3/4 of my wicked Acro collection because of a little bit of a nutrient spike/mini-crash whatever you want to call it and heat stress this summer. The Acros were IMO weak because I think I was starving them. So I started feeding them regularly and that really kicked the algae into gear if the 6 months of fishfood wasn't enough.
The up side is most of these Acros are several years to almost 5 years old and I can't remember when they looked so good.

Now my good old Berlin classic is choking on the crap, nonstop for over a month now, just churning out the coffee into a gallon jug.

The house thing didn't work out and I did not set up the system over there, so I still don't have a DSB module which I really wish I had now.

The algae is really getting out of hand and I'll have to do something here soon. But no one algae is dominant although I still hit any hair types harder than all the rest.

In conclusion, I learned:

Feed the Acros
Run the skimmer
keep the plants in a different box from the corals
Huge diversity of algae types is possible and nothing has crashed as such. Some things fade in and out.
Happy coral(softies and stonys) can put up with surprising amounts of algae around them, weak ones can't.

That's where I am at this point.

[Flatlander]

Doug, although much different in design, I dont see why it would not help. A search should show a thread, where one guy runs two screens in his sump, on a 45 degree angle.

Kent, FWIW, I agree with Frick on the skimming issue. I dont agree that skimmers are not really the best answer or part of it. I tried several times to run this tank, scrubber only. Everytime I have noticed increased algae growth, esp. on the front glass.

Its only been a couple weeks with the skimmer offline. So far things are fine, but this time I have some different calerpa species in the tank, to assist.

My load is not bad. All the fish are smaller types, with my cinnamon clown pair being the largest. However, a friend is shutting down his 280, which is where my Red Sea sailfin was residing. Guess he,s coming back home.

My scrubber is listed as a 250 g scrubber. I have always fed a lot, which is part of the problem Frick mentioned.

[DougSupreme]

I was hoping to be able to place a screen at just off of horizontal so the water would run off the screen as it receded but not enough of an angle to require a large drop in water level. I am thinking of trying this in a 55 gal fuge. Will it be possible to grow macros in here also, or will the turf consume all the latent energy in the water?

[ducker]

really cool thread.... as I'm going to be setting up a 65gal skimmerless system with zonal filtration.

Frick, how often did you do water changes? With "thickening" water I figure not nearly that often.

[jglackin]

Great thread. I just read it from end to end. It appears, however, only 1 person from this entire thread is still using an ATS. Is this accurate? Have you all given up?

[jglackin]

Nobody? Not a single person using a turf scrubber?

[Frick-n-Frags]

YEEEEEOW!!!!!!

let's bring this up to speed.
I idled down the algae experiment and parlayed it into a huge chaeto wad, which I was selling for a couple years there.

then I idled the whole system down to VHO's, 2 tanks and softies(and bowser my old fish) because I was too busy to reef correctly.

that was for I think 2 years until this past fall. I basically geared up the light, replaced the sump and started to basically cook the system out of nutrients. In late Feb my chaeto wad started rapidly dying and the last few bastions of assorted algae really fell away. I still get a random type appear here and there, especially after really major disruptions to the system, but the algae just can't get a foothold anymore.

I'm going to play with stoneys and gorgs again for a while, like the good old, old days before my little couple year adventure with the plants (which I still think are as cool as the corals)

If my chaeto wad completely fizzles, I may fire up an extra box of water with some nasty bright lights on it and a few glass plates in there to see if it is capable of cooking up some micros.

We'll see how the combined maintenance schedule redo and the feeding routine keeps up with excess nutrient issues as time progresses.




also, anyone harvesting a macro in a fuge is doing algae scrubbing, so yeah, it is actually very popular

[Flatlander]

Originally posted by jglackin
Nobody? Not a single person using a turf scrubber?

When I downsized I ran my scrubber on the smaller tanks for awile. However since moving, I dont have a large room for my aquarium and a much smaller sps only tank.

My friend was going to run my turf scrubber on his 180 and even built a new acrylic body for it, {if anyone remembers the broken body during shipping}. However it still sits, shutdown.

I never had nitrates or phophates, even with bare bottom and it allowed me to feed a lot. But I dont know how much it filtered alone, without my skimmer running.

[Swanwillow]

no, old threads don't die.

Is there anywhere to even get a ATS anymore?

[jglackin]

Inland Aquatics has them. There is also a manufacturer that makes a "bio wheel", or something like that, and it is a turf scrubber.

I have been running mine for 4 months now and it grows a lot of macro and a lot of pods, but it is unclear to me whether it is doing much for me in the area of bio filtration. In the interest of full disclosure, my TS is much too small for my tank to be counted on to export much waste. I am running mine in addition to heavy skimming and a fuge full of algae.

[rbc1225]

There was a guy selling them here somewhere. I can look and see if I can find his email address or something. They looked pretty nice. I am also probably going to build my own starting with a rubbermaid tub and building my own dump bucket. Somewhere I found a link that has all the info needed to build. I know I know, Somewhere Somewhere. I am at work so I can't put my hands on it. PM me and I will try to find the info tonight when I get home.

[Swanwillow]

I was looking through inlands website and couldn't find them. And, I'm not a good DIY'er, so I'd like something to plug and clean weekly. Do you have to get your own turf algaes, or do they send them with (from IA?)

[Kreeger1]

Good stuff, reading this thread again was a good blast from the past
erik

[rbc1225]

Here is the link to the guy that got busted trying to sell these in the Equitment For Sale area of this board. I think they thought he was a commercial vendor and he might be, but look at his pics. He has pics of his ATS for sale.

http://reefcentral.com/forums/member...&userid=147252

[samtheman]

Originally posted by Frick-n-Frags
Thanx Agu.

cwa. I have been trying for many years to establish a stable system using balanced biology.

My model is the Plants->herbivore->predator model which specifies a large plant pop, smaller herbivore pop and tiny predator pop. I want my tank to grow its own food once I supply the energy and chemical building blocks.

I don't want a sand bed or anything else that can become a nutrient sink in here so out goes the substrate, ANY substrate. No anaerobic nothing except what is deep in the LR(beyond my control). I want wastes bound in biology that I remove, measurable, monitorable, not slowly building up as "inert" substance. Substance is substance and I don't see the removal mechanism.(just the sweep it under the rug mechanism)
I think sedimentation of sandbeds is going to cause a lot of heartbreak down the road here on DSB central, but that is only my opinion on the EZ way out of tank maintenance and ONLY time will tell. Even Dr Ron admits they need to be reseeded and other key maintenance. I am going for bulletproof not delayed crash(or even the remote possibility).

I don't want any mechanical filtration. Check out your skimmate under a microscope to see all the one celled life trapped in it (if you have any,mine was green slime it was so much) I have hated my skimmer for years because of all it pulled out, but I have found that there seems to be a critical mass of water necessary for stability which I have only built up to over the past 3 years, so I had to keep the darn thing on, but that has been my only mechanical filter for 10 years.

I have grown about every kind of SPS and softie for years with virtually no feeding, not even the one fish gets fed regularly. Hunt or starve buddy, my buddy is over 8 years old and looks like a show animal, so I think most of you waaaay overfeed your fish(pollute the water therefore employ more sewage removal techniques like sand beds and skimmers. BTW, the process industry uses all this stuff for sewage treatment, look in the Omega catalogs, if you think we invented foam fractioning and redox meters, fluidized sand or leach beds?)

If my macros crash, I will have to put the skimmer back on and try again.

What kind of filter is a refugium???? Or are you referring to Caulerpa in a quiet sump as an algae scrubber.
Guess what, there isn't enough nutrients in my water to grow Caulerpa (IMO green macroslime which is a great hi-nutrient indicator along with all the other green micros)

So why do you run all these filters? Are they necessary? or just the "IN thing" to do. How do you know what negative effects all that causes.

My system can go without power for 24 hrs and not be hurt(been there). I can isolate any of my 5 boxes of water containing life (dark sump doesn't count) from the rest of the system and it can stand alone.

I am almost there.... Now I am done defending myself

Any body else running algae scrubbers as the primary filter?????

I use all of those filters so that I can feed my system heavily, almost as much as in the ocean. My intent is to have a well fed and healty system. Starve yours if you want to.

[Kreeger1]

samtheman
I don't think you followed the thought process much on this thread. Hes not looking to starve his tank, hes looking for a tank that basically feeds itself and to do that you can't really use massive skimmers that strip the tank. To have a well fed tank, you actually don't have to feed that much if your doing it right.
erik

[Swanwillow]

and its a 4 year old thread.. so that was, like, well, a LONG time ago for arguing
Thanks for the link, BTW! But, the pictures are gone. LOL
I really do like this thread, a LOT. I didn't know about ATS until, last night. I was looking up different types of filtration methods, found the mud system, THEN found this system.

I am planning a high-bioload tank, lots of heavy feedings of very fatty food, and well, a reefers night mare!

[rbc1225]

I am not sure if you are responding to me as far as thenks for the thread and the pics are gone, but look in the gallery and they are still there.

http://reefcentral.com/gallery/showg...147252&thumb=1

[Swanwillow]

yup, found em now. I also found another thread thats fairly recent on them in the reef chemistry forum.