Mega-Powerful Nitrate and Phosphate Remover Replaces Skimmer, Refugium, Everythin

It does not "go back into the tank". The bucket is not "creating algae" out of nowhere; the stuff to make the algae is already in your water, right now, as you read this. It's there, waiting for a bright enough light so it can grow.
Algae grows first where it has the brightest light, which in this case is the bucket. If it were going to grow in the tank, it would already have grown there.

 

I'm not going to lie, I'll be giving this one a shot. Have a 30g sump under my 90g display (which is currently battling with cyano). In the sump there is a huge spot filled with bioballs which i really dont need in there anyway. I will however, leave the skimmer running, for the fact that fractation is a natural process in any ocean.

I've always been interested in a bio filter fed with algae. If this ends up working, I will be very content.

 

Phayes what's your N and P now? You only need 120 sq in of screen... a perfect size for a 5 gal bucket, or just hang the screen over your sump.

 

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:

 

Currently testing at 0 N and 0 Phos. However, with the current cyano problem, it's no surprise. But if this algae filter works, it will take the phos and nitrates out of the water before the cyano does. Score. Now i just need to figure out how I'm going to set it up... seems simple, but my wet dry is closed in, and the overflow dumps into 2 seperate drains into one giant trickle filter, which goes over my bio balls. The top is sealed in and black in color. I could always drill about a hundred holes, then prop lights up from any angle possible and hope that its enough light... or i could set up some type of screen after the bioballs in the sump, and allow the water to flow through it.

 

I think you've got the idea. Only thing I might add is when fighting cyano, since it can fix it's own N out of very low amounts in the water (as you see), you'll need the very highest power of turf filtering. That means very very powerful lights, and hopefully, a pre-grown real turf screen to start with. I'd use at least 2 watts per square inch of screen, preferable 3. I'm only using 1, and the last remaining small patches of cyano are taking a long time to die. Of course I'm feeding 4 times what I was before, too

 

Good thread! Thanks for posting!

 

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."

 

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!"

 

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.