Blue Water 2000 Algae scrubber.

Not much to report on my nitrates. They're hovering around 15-20.
My skimmer has been off since July 20.. Not by choice though. I've had some plumbing issues that I'm going to try to resolve this week. I wonder if the skimmer was running during the past week if my nitrates would be lower.
I had to redo the Santa Monica screen as it's not strong enough to hold itself up with my design. It's still the best for holding algae but what I did was get a tank divider and zip tied a SM screen on each side. It seems to be working great so far and I'm not afraid to take it out more often for cleanings now. Here's a pic:

 

Reefdude: It will obiously remove any algae at that moment, but afterwards it will allow much more to hold on, and thus "grow more faster". Yes you'll want to clean your screen more now, since more is growing. For pics of tanks, start here:
Algae Scrubbers • View forum - Pics of Successfully Scrubbed Tanks

Av8: Well you don't want to remove what's in the holes; the idea of the holes is to keep algae there, so that after a cleaning you still have filtering. So you just want to scrape it, then just run tap water over it normally to rinse it.

Grimace: You can remove a skimmer at any time. The "nasty stuff" you are pulling out is food that should be going to the corals. On top of this, the skimmer is not pulling out any Inorganic Nitrate and Inorganic Phosphate, at all.

 

Hmmmmm. It's been a few months since I've been on the site and last time I was here everybody was arguing about using a turf scrubber set up, I think the issue was yellow water or algae blooms, something like that. So have the tables turned and now it's ok to use an algae scrubber? I'd love to not have to run a skimmer and deal with the mess/issues associated with them.

 

There never has been yellow water or algae blooms. You just have to operate the scrubber properly, which you can see in the faq below. A scrubber-only tank just won tank of the month on another forum, and mine won that also in feb on yet another forum.

Skimmers work good at removing food (protein), if that is what you need done.

 

I think a lot of people are misinformed and afraid to try something new and sorta experimental. Mine has been running for six weeks and has lowered my nitrates to 15-20 from 40-60. I haven't really had a problem with measurable phosphates so I can't really tell any difference there. I have no yellowing but, it's a must to clean the thing regularly. I had a small bit of green hair starting to show up about a month before I set up the scrubber and it has decreased but not completely gone. I had some cyano that was completely gone in about two weeks and has not come back at all.
I still run a skimmer but it was down for about 3 weeks and I didn't really notice much in water chemistry but the water did not look as clean with out it. My algae still hasn't gotten to the stage where I'm scraping large amounts so it still hasn't fully matured yet.... If my algae gets more mature I may experiment turning the skimmer off to see what happens.

 

The "clean" water look you get with a skimmer is because the food has been removed from the water. If you want a "real" natural reef, you can't do this. Go diving some time and look at the water on a natural reef; there are millions of specks and dots and particles and things floating in the water in a super thick soup. And that's just six inches in front of your face. These things are what feed everything.

 

i have a cowrie snail that some how made it to my ats caught him just in the nick of time he ate a whole corner . now im figuring out hell got up there.

 

Yeah.. that's about what I thought. I'm probably going to be using this ATS in conjunction with the skimmer but, I may turn it off for a day or two after coral feedings. I just like my water crystal clear..(personal preference).

 

Update.. I started with some sort of glue I can't even remember what it was that didn't hold up a week. Then I've superglued pieces as it fell apart. From what I hear JB weld glue is the way to go. The superglue is ok but takes a lot.

 

I'm happy to report nitrates are 0... zero..nada ... undetectable.
I've been battling these nitrates for months. The scrubber was started a little over two months ago. I think one reason it took longer for me to reach zero nitrate is because 1. I had really high nitrates (40-80).. 2. I cleaned all the algae off the screen several times.. it was the nasty black stuff mostly. My phosphates have always read 0 or atleast lowest on the cards but there is always some there. I can't really tell by those cards. I haven't done a water change in a while to see how the nitrtates come down.. so I'm getting water ready for that. I think my corals didn't like that .. I've had 3 SPS bleach here recently and I can't figure that out. I have large swings in temp, and alk.and not enough flow.Maybe it has something to do with that. My Apex controller will be here today so I should at least take care of the temp part. Also installing Koralia 6 on wavemaker for more flow.Trying to get things as stable as possible.