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Thread: Mega-Powerful Nitrate and Phosphate Remover Replaces Skimmer, Refugium, part 1 of 4

  1. #26
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    Part 2 of 2:


    Day 8:

    Hi Res: http://www.radio-media.com/fish/ScreenBuildDay8.jpg

    Day 9; Some brown spots are getting thick, and some green areas are starting to cover up other areas. Almost all holes are grown over; time to clean!

    Hi Res: http://www.radio-media.com/fish/ScreenBuildDay9.jpg

    Day 9 Screen Removed; Note the light colored spots on the bottom half. These are probably copepods eating the algae, since I did not clean and freshwater-rinse in over a week:

    Hi Res: http://www.radio-media.com/fish/ScreenBuildDay9out.jpg

    Day 9 Closeup of Spots:
    [pic limit of post]
    Hi Res: http://www.radio-media.com/fish/Scre...dDay9spots.jpg

    Day 9 Removing the green algae by hand first (used toothbruth second):


    Day 9 Harvest of first week; Remember that this screen is getting what nutrients are leftover from my other screen:


    Day 9 After Cleaning; Note I cleaned both sides, which you only do the first cleaning (thereafter you only clean one side at a time):

    Hi Res: http://www.radio-media.com/fish/Scre...dDay9after.jpg


    So that takes us through the first cleaning cycle of a new screen. Was surprised to see the light spots on the screen since I never saw any on my established screen, but then this new screen is so thin right now that any spots become easily visible. You should not go more than a week between cleaning and a freshwater rinse (freshwater will kill the pods) like I just did; I just wanted to get a decent amount of algae to harvest so you would be able to see it.

    Interesting that all the spots are on the lower half of the screen, which in my bucket is the part that stays underwater more often, since the bucket fills partially as the pump runs. (It shouldn't do this, but I have not connected a ball valve to the pump yet, so I can't slow it down). So apparently, the copepods can't survive well when the water flows away, leaving just air. This is a good reason to not submerge your screen, and also to consider having a timer on the pump to let the screen dry out for 30 or 60 seconds between "waves".

    On the cleaning, note that I took off all the green, but left the brown. You always want to do this, in order to prepare the screen for developing real red/brown turf later.

    Note on "Day 9 Screen Removed", that there is a bit more coverage on the right than on the left. That's because most of the flow has been going on the right side. But as you can see it does not change the coverage that much.

  2. #27
    Master Reefer Astrivian's Avatar
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    This is a really cool idea. Isn't DIY fun!

    I might give this a shot in my 30 gallon BioCube. I need something to compete with the calipura in the main tank. How much light do you think you need (other than more is better)? I have seen some small clip on LED lights perfect for the back of a sump. I wonder if those would be enough to get this to grow.
    Samuel

    "If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.... There is magic in it. Let the most absent-minded men be plunged in his deepest reveries--stand that man on his legs, set his feet a-going, and he will infallibly lead you to water, if water there be in all that region."

    Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Ch. 1.

    http://religiousspiritualism.wordpress.com

  3. #28
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    30 gal tank needs 30 sq in of screen, double sided. So a 5 X 6 screen in a 2 gal bucket would work. Use the same lights I listed at the beginning, one on each side. By three weeks the caulerpa will be a goner.

  4. #29
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    Here's a neat screen that someone just built. Since there was no vertical room in his sump area, he asked about horizontal options and I showed him the commercial floating turf screens. He made one out of floating material:


  5. #30
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    this guide is awesome, i,m gonna be building me one of these as soon as i get some time to myself,
    thanks for posting this so everyone can see and share

  6. #31
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    That's cool bear, which type were you looking at building?

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    Here the first pre-grown installation I've seen (except for mine)... jski711 on another board said: "I can't believe how well this DIY thing worked. It literally took all of 45 minutes once I had the materials. And I have noticed my pH raise up about .15 in a few hours since installing it."


  8. #33
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    A step by step guide and parts and media being used would be great at the beginning of this artice.

    I'm just skimming articles durring lunch.

    So far sounds very interesting!

  9. #34
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    Check the other 3 parts of this thread; the instructions are all there.

    Anyways, here is the first screen builder ("varga" from another thread) to reach the cleaning stage:




    Some comments from him along the way:

    "Mine has very little growth on it, its been 4 days......more light?" (Which he then did)

    "The light now is right on the screen, almost touching it"

    "I'll have to reach in my tank to take out HA [for seeding] which is not easy! (Which he then did)

    "We've now had a burst of growth in the last 24 hours; Here it is on day 6."

    "We had another major burst of growth in the last 24 hours! its a redish/brownish stuff, Im guessing this is turf?" (No, it was brown diatoms)

    "This thing is a great chiller!! forgot to turn the fan off last night, woke up to a 73 degree tank!"

  10. #35
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    In a classic case of "not doing research", some anti-turf folks on another site have ended up helping out the turf scene. They are constantly accusing pro-turf or pro-algae folks, and especially anti-skimmer folks, of not having research. So they post a research video from the College of Marine Science (U of S. FL, St. Petersburg) on that site, which is supposed to prove with research that algae, especially turf, kills corals. Yes. Then they
    follow it up with "So I guess you didn't watch the video, right?"

    Well. I took the time to watch it (one hour). But, I guess they did NOT. The video starts out appearing to make the point of "algae kills corals", and if you stopped watching after fifteen minutes, that's what you'd think. But the first part of that presentation is just a setup for the presenter's further explanations, and is not the point itself.

    It's a similar situation to a presentation for beginners about how rock, sand, and the nitrogen cycle works: You would start by saying "If I have a fish in a bucket of water, and I pour in ammonia, the fish will die." This is true, but it's only used to set up later explanations of how rock and sand come into the picture to stop the death of the fish.

    So it turns out that if you watch the whole research video, the presenter/researcher not only makes the point of pro-algae folks, and counters the point of the people who posted it (as their evidence), but it also counters the entire group of people who say no-skimmers and high-DOC's are bad. I've been saying that my focus never was skimmer or no-skimmer; instead my focus was reducing N and P cheaply, quickly, and with no risk. But since these people made this video/research available, I'll use it:

    The presenter is trying to show how "algae that kills coral" would SEEM to occur, so later he can show you what they really found in their research. The crux of his presentation is basically: "We thought higher DOC's were the cause of coral death; We were wrong. Lower DOC's are" (these are my words).

    So here is the video, with rough quotes of what the video says, along with the minutes and seconds into the video where you can see it for yourself:

    http://www.marine.usf.edu/videos/2007-01-26.wmv

    23:30 "Bulk DOC does not correlate with coral decline; higher DOC areas have healthier corals; lower DOC areas have weaker corals. The opposite of what we predicted".

    24:40 "The DOC to DIN ratio's are higher on healthy reefs, and lower on less-healthy reefs".

    25:45 "Microbial numbers are elevated with a lower DOC to DIN ratio" (!) (even I got that one wrong).

    34:00 "Christmas Island, with the really low DOC, has the highest pathogens, while Kingman Island, with the highest DOC, has the lowest pathogens."

    37:00 "On Kingman Island you have high hard-coral coverage and the lowest disease [and highest DOC]. That's weird! What you SHOULD find is that as hard-coral coverage reduces, it should be harder for the pathogens to find hosts, so you should see a pathogen decrease. But we're not seeing that, which means there is SOMETHING ELSE going on."

    49:20 "The DOC definitely always goes down, in the really bad coral areas".

    52:39 "You can actually put the corals where the nutrients are really high, and the corals are not dying; in some cases they tend to grow better, which is also true in our [???].

    So I submit to them, using their own evidence, that not using a skimmer, with the resultant increase in DOC's (and now apparent decrease in microbes), is not in-itself a coral killer. Something else is. And this explains why some people using algal-only filtration can grow great sps.

  11. #36
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    Wow. There's so much to post that I don't know which should be first. Today I'll cover max inputs that's I've been able to achieve.

    I've been experimenting with how much I can feed my 90g, with only my 144 square inch turf screen doing the filtering. I'd add more food for a few days, then the Salifert N test would start showing a tiny bit of pink (about a .2 reading). Then I'd cut the food in half, until the reading went clear (zero N measured). Interestingly, P never increased. Ever. Only N. So after a few tries, here's the max I've been able feed the tank while just barely getting an N increase:


    Max Feeding:

    Liquid Life Marine Plankton with Cyclopeeze: 3 pumps a day
    Liquid Life Bio Plankton (live phyto): 2 pumps a day
    Frozone mysis: 2 cubes a day, unwashed, thawed in 4 oz tap water.
    Silversides: 1 per week (for the eel)


    Tank:

    90 Display, BB
    20 Sump
    150 pounds LR
    60 inches fish
    40 corals, all softie and lps
    6000 gph circulation
    Carbon now used once a month for allelpathics


    I'm now settling in on a lesser amount:

    1 pump phyto
    1-2 pumps plankton
    2 cubes mysis, unwashed, thawed in 4 oz tap water.
    Silversides: 1 per week (for the eel)

  12. #37
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    Here is the screen from the person who bought pre-grown turf from Inland Aquatics, after growing on the tank for one week, and then after cleaning:



  13. #38
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    Here's a rather ingenious screen-in-a-trashcan that someone just built. This type of design will eliminate evaporation (and cooling), if that's what you want. One thing I might change would be the distance of the bulb to the screen; it should be so close that it almost touches it. In all the builds I've seen so far, the ones that have slow growth always have the bulb too far away, or too small a wattage.


  14. #39
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    Here is an example of a screen that I wish were done better. He's using the skimmer output and dropping it right down on the screen at an angle, so that most of it goes through the screen. I'd rather see the water spread out across the screen. Also, the light is too far away. Thus, he got very little growth in the first seven days:


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    Today I thought I'd show what's up with my screen. I'm back to using just my main original bucket (that started with pre-grown screen), since the 2nd bucket that I used for the build thread is on loan to the lfs. I'll be posting progress pics of that soon. But for my tank/screen, N and P are zero of course. I check every day unless I forget. The main development has been true green turf, i.e, not green hair or slime. Now, hair and slime are always there (they grow right over everything else), but I started noticing that after regular cleanings there were still some green remaining. I thought I was just rushing and missing it, but it got to be too much green. So on the next cleaning I used the camera, and when cleaning I found for the first time true green turf. I also let it grow more than I normally would, so the pics would show more:

    Here is the screen just before cleaning, looking down into the bucket (both sides looked about the same).


    Hi-Res: http://www.radio-media.com/fish/Scre...ng08-27-08.jpg


    Here is the screen pulled out (still not cleaned):


    Hi-Res: http://www.radio-media.com/fish/Scre...ed08-27-08.jpg


    Here is the screen after a regular cleaning (scrubbing) with fingernails and toothbrush. Note that tons of green remains:


    Hi-Res: http://www.radio-media.com/fish/Scre...ng08-27-08.jpg


    Here is the screen after scraping with a razor blade:


    Hi-Res: http://www.radio-media.com/fish/Scre...ng08-27-08.jpg


    Note how most of the green turf is on the top half of the screen, near the lights. The flow is the same; only the light is stronger near the top (the very top is only one inch from the lights). It had been exactly on one month since I'd used a razor before this. It took that long for the real turf to grow (both red/brown and green). Real turf takes so long because it is very tightly packed and strong, with very little water. It looks like the green turf grows a bit faster than the red/brown, however, and is not quite as strong; it grows longer too. However I still could not scrub it off with my fingernails or a toothbrush, no matter how hard I tried. Only the razor could get it off. Took about 5 minutes; not bad for a month of growing.

    Anyways, intrigued by this green turf, I went down to the beach with a camera so I could search for what I've been wanting for a while: Pics of how real turf lives. Sure enough I found it on the pylings of the pier at Paradise Cove (just north of Malibu):


    Hi-Res: http://www.radio-media.com/fish/TurfBeach.jpg


    Hi-Res: http://www.radio-media.com/fish/TurfBeachCloseup.jpg


    It's exacty what was on my screen. The white specs you see are sand. In order to get the second (closup) pic, I had to pinch the turf very hard and pull it out... like pulling out plant roots; then I held it up for the pic. Note also that it's low tide, which means that the turf holds its color and stays alive for many hours in direct sunlight with no water. Further down the beach I found the same turf on rocks that were 100 feet away from the water.

    So, like I said before, real turf is used to living out of the water, and that's why I say that to simulate this (as Aday's machine does) you need some type of on-off-on pulsed flow, and the easiest way I could think to do this was a wavemaker timer (although, as I'll post soon, other folks are coming up with ingenious ways too.)

    And again, the importance of light is clearly apparent with this green turf, since it grew no more that 6" away from the lights at the top. And lastly, it does look like some of the red/brown is being replaced by the green, which makes sense since the original red/brown came from IA with their different nutrients and lighting.

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    Reader Hits Zero!

    'Gone Postal' who is on the RS site, becomes the first homebuilt screen user to reach zero nitrate. No pics from him yet, but he says, "My trates hit 0 for the first time in the 5 months that my tank has been up. The lowest i had ever gotten them to was 5. I built my setup [9 days ago]. I have some growth, but nothing too spectacular. The screen is completely covered in brown, but it seems as if it's just surface algae - not really hair algae, etc like I'd originally expected. Comes off really easy. If I just wipe my finger across, the screen is clear again."

    And here's a second person below, with the build-of-the-day. He says "I am currently running this system, and I'm hoping to reduce my nitrates from a steady 20 down to zero. Here's my set up on the 2nd week. (water is supplied from the output of my UV filter)". Note that he drilled his pipe, instead of cutting a slot in it; he said he did not have a rotary cutting tool, and thus he had to make it only one-sided:




  17. #42
    Apprentice bearusa's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by SantaMonica View Post
    That's cool bear, which type were you looking at building?
    im in two minds at the mo whether to go for the setup above my sump, or the bin idea as pictured in a post using the white kitchen bin, i,m very limited to space so i need to think carefully beforetrying anything,

  18. #43
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    Well the in-sump version takes the least space (version 3 is best); just raise it enough to be above the waterline.

  19. #44
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    I'm ready to give this a go, and my plan is a little different than others here, because it involves getting water out of the sump and then back into it. That's because the only room I have in my cramped stand is next to the sump, not above it.

    My design will essentially use a bucket sitting next to the sump. This bucket housed my RDSB, and I will be removing most, if not all, of the sand. The way that the bucket used to work was that it would get fed water through a bulkhead (uniseal) in the top, and then also drain out of the top with another (larger) bulkhead. The goal here of course, was to max out the depth of water/sand in the bucket. But it's the exact opposite that we need for the scrubber.

    Solution?

    A siphon: pulling water up, over, and out of the bucket and back into the sump. Since my overflow at the top will still be in place, I'll be safe if the siphon breaks (a temporarily submerged screen is no big deal). And given that my sump water level in the final chamber is reasonably low, I'll have a decent amount of space for an open air portion of screen. I can perhaps even keep other macro in the bottom, still flooded, section of the bucket to feed off any extra light.

    I've already built and tested the siphon: I'm using 3/4 inch PVC with a 1/2 inch T-fitting in the top middle, off of which I have a ball valve and then a pressure fitting to connect to some airline tubing. I can then start the siphon quite easily by sucking the air out via the airline and then closing the ball valve once I get water through the airline. An easy start siphon like this is a must in my cramped space: trying to fool with threading airline up into the siphon bend to suck out air and getting it just right simply wouldn't be plausible.

    The rest of the setup will be mostly as everyone else has it: a pump feeding a waterfall pipe over a screen, lit by some sealed bulbs (is as much as 125watt equiv really necessary? Again I have little space, and so the small the bulb, the better)

    I'll hopefully get more of this done over the weekend. No pictures yet since I don't have a camera available currently.

  20. #45
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    Sounds very doable. Did you look at page 1 for the original bucket design?... sounds very similar. It's a little hard to visualize the siphon arrangement you mention, but I take it that you would not be using a pump. Yes you can keep macro in the bottom of the bucket, and this will happen on it's own... just watch it. You'll be pulling it out in handfulls. And the lighting is indeed critical; it's more important than screen size. So if you need to shrink something else to get the bulbs in there, do that. Matter of fact, I now have four of those bulbs on my bucket. The more, the better. Can't wait for the pics...

  21. #46
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    I'm trying to stay as close to that design as possible, definately. The technical hurdle is simply that I cannot drain water out of the bottom of the bucket using gravity, since it'll already be basically on the floor.

    I can't use a second pump to get the water back out of the bucket either, because sooner or later one pump is going to beat the other one. A single pump will run the waterfall pipe, which will fill the bucket. And then the siphon will reach from the bottom of the bucket to the bottom of the sump, and thus keep the bucket from filling (since the siphon will even it out so that the water level in the bucket matches that in the lowest chamber of the sump).

    I'm actually going to be making a bit of an overflow using 2inch pipe with a cap on the end to hold the bottom of the siphon in the bucket end. This will allow me to maybe have some substrate in the bottom of the bucket without the siphon sucking it all up (alternatively, even if there is no substrate, it will keep gunk that might line the bottom of the bucket from being sucked up).

  22. #47
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    Don't want to do that. Just a matter of time before the siphon stops and the bucket overflows. Instead, get a quality self-priming pump like an Eheim 1260 which can suck in air. Put it in the bottom of the bucket, and have it push water from the bucket to the sump. Then just run a siphon from the sump (or better, a T from the overflow) to the waterfall pipe. This way, when the siphon one day stops, the bucket will empty but nothing will overflow. When you finally get to it, the pump will still be running, trying to pump air. You just re-start the siphon, and you are back running.

  23. #48
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    I'm not sure I follow you: how would the pump in the bucket balance its flow rate out of the bucket with the water coming into the bucket? If they're even slightly unbalanced, either the bucket will eventually fill, or the pump will suck air and blow bubbles, no? And how can a siphon from the sump to the bucket work at all, given that the water level of the waterfall slit will be well above that of the sump?

    The bucket I have now should be able to handle the siphon breaking with it's overflow pipe at the top: worst case scenario is simply that the screen will be more submerged than we'd want, and then only until I restarted the siphon. The extra water would just drain back into the sump via the overflow outlet. Given how easy this sort of siphon is to start (open ball valve, suck a little, close ball valve) it shouldn't be a big deal as far as I can tell.

    Course, there's also no way I could afford that pump atm anyway.

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    You are right, would not work. How about then looking at the in-sump version on page 1 that require no pumps at all?

  25. #50
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    No room on that score, and the non-portability is a big issue, because there's no room to lift the screen alone out of the sump for cleaning without creating a gigantic mess (even getting the dry screen in there above the sump to test fit it was a struggle: can't imagine it dripping wet and covered with slime). I litterally have about 5 inches between the top of the sump walls and the top of the cabinet opening (though I have some more space than that on the inside). The bucket should allow me to easily remove the screen by just pulling the bucket out temporarily.

    If it works, it hopefully should be another useful option for flexibility. The only hard part is creating the backup overflow, but this is basically just a drain at the top of the bucket instead of the bottom as in your plans, and the only extra complication there is usually filing down the extra "ribs" they put up that the top of buckets which can get in the way of bulkheads.

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