Mega-Powerful Nitrate and Phosphate Remover

[SantaMonica]

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."

[SantaMonica]

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!"

[nemoloid]

Great stuff!

How different is this "brown algae" from the one growing on my LR???

[SantaMonica]

The current understanding of turf filtering is that the key is to grow real turf, which is reddish/brown in color, and stiff like astro turf in texture, and to remove the green hair/slime algae that grows first and/or on top of the turf. In otherwords, green hair/slime is not turf; it's a nuisance algae in this application, and it prevents the real turf from getting light and flow.

What happens sometimes (or what happened to folks who tried turf in the past), is that they thought that the green algae was just a different type of "turf". So they left it. But it's not turf. It's a nuisance algae covering the real turf. However it grows much faster and longer than the turf ("fast growing" does not mean high nutrient extraction, however, because most of content of green algae is water). This explains why it's the first algae to grow on a new un-seeded screen, and why even if you buy a pre-grown screen, the screen seems to morph from brownish/red into green.

But it's not morphing; it being smothered by the green. So for a screen that is less than a few months old, instead of scraping weekly all the algae off the screen, instead you should be "scrubbing" the green algae off of the turf algae (thereby leaving the turf). While the green is good in and of itself (it does do some filtering, and it will be the first to grow on a new screen), it does not compare to real red/green turf.

The trick is to keep the green hair/slime off of the turf so the turf does not get shaded. It's really easy to scrub the green off, like washing your hair. Just run tap water over it, and scrub with your fingernail. The green comes right off, and turf stays on (you'll need more than your fingernails to remove real turf.) You should hold off doing an actual scraping of the turf until the screen is completely full of it, and even then consider just scraping part of the turf at a time.

[wgtan]

[SantaMonica]

[SantaMonica]

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.

[lomi]

[SantaMonica]

[SantaMonica]

[joeyp]

can i use this type of filter as a starting filter for my FOWLR tank?

so i don't need to purchase any other filtration equipment?

will the algae grow during the cycling stage of the tank?

thanks

[SantaMonica]

I don't see why not. I haven't done it, but a FOWLR has much easier requirements that a reef. The turf will remove ammonia, nitrate, and phosphate. That should be enough to keep your fish happy, and your glass clean.

[joeyp]

thanks man.

i'm still in the planning process of my tank.

will let you know how it goes.

will implement it when i start cycling my tank.

[SantaMonica]

The cycling should really help start the new screen, with all the A, N and P it will have.

[SantaMonica]

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: