Wow, your Chaeto looks amazing. You mentioned you used a Flood Light from Home Depot. Could you elaborate? please? lol Beautiful chaeto. Do you use Filter Socks on your sump? Air stones to churn the chaeto? What flood light specifically?
thanks in advance!
I use a 40b as a sump and have my return and skimmer in the first compartment, it so happens that I also have a basketball sized ball of chaeto towards the center of the sump, which is my first chamber, right before three baffles that lead to a small last chamber that contains a heater, apex probes and ato sensor. My chaeto does not tumble, it actually doesn't move at all! The bottom of my chaeto is full of small white fan worms and I rarely touch it. I only trim the chaeto from the top, it grows very fast and my tank is always lacking in iron and the other trace elements needed to grow chaeto. I used to use Triton, but due to availability issues I switched to ATI and have not noticed a difference between the products.
I can't remember the exact model of my light, I'll post if I can find it, but it is just a home depot 65 watt led flood light with a cheap metal reflector that runs about 12 hours a day. The light seems to have enough punch to keep the chaeto at the bottom of the clump happy.
After two weeks of not trimming the chaeto it begins to grow out of the water. I really have no idea why it grows the way it does. I feed my tank fairly heavily and almost never have any measurable Nitrate, I do run about .03 p04.
Oh, and no filter socks, I'm way too lazy to clean them regularly. I have some detritus in the sump but it doesn't seem to bother anything. That's about it. And for those of you who are curious, I'm an acro addict... my tank is full of them, some the size of a large cantaloupe and others are typical small frags.