ZoWhat
10K Club member
I believe deep in one of the threads I posted I've been having issues with GHA TURF style.
I've thrown a bunch of ideas against the wall seeing what sticks. These past 3 weeks the GHA Turf has stopped growing
Here are the things I threw at the tank and really not sure what may have been the answer:
* Removed all red light from my lighting system. I custom build my own LED lights and was pushing about 10% red light around 1-2hrs a day. I pulled all my lighting and resoldered 420nm blue light diodes where the red light diodes were. I also reduced all full spectrum white diodes down to 2 white diodes per my 4 LED fixtures. I'm now pushing 400nm, 420nm, 440nm blues/UV as my MAIN lighting source. Each fixtures has, idk, 30-40 3w diodes. Everyone one of the fixtures has all 400-440nm diodes except 2(two) 520nm green diodes and 2(two) bright white diodes. ZERO red diodes, all reds are G.O.N.E. .... whites severely limited
* Filter socks. I watched BRSinvestigates and they did a study that if you religiously change your filter socks every 3rd day (if they need it or not) NO3/PO4 gets reduced by 40%. That's a big number.
* Running my Chateo pink/red plant grow light over my Chaeto 24/7. Heres the floodlamp style I'm using:
Found on Amazon under "Thinklux plant grow light"
* I have two Vortech mp40w and I have an Apex. Never married the two to manage the water flow. I bought the wireless Apex module to control my Vortechs. 3hrs before my light come on I BLAST the tank with my Vortechs at 100% Constant flow. This stirs the tank up quite a bit. But I mostly BB so very very little sand that I do have gets blown
around. But LR and coral do get a ton of flow flushing out junk.
* Running a very wet skimmer. My skimmer is now taking out about 1gal of skim a DAY. So the ATO is putting 1gal of RODI a day.... i'm premixing in gallon-jugs 1 gal of new SW a day. So in essence I'm doing a 1 gal WC a day via the skimmer exporting and my ATO and my new salt mix replacing the exported skim.
* Manual removal. I own two of these 2ft long stainless steel hemostats:
Found on Amazon under 24 in hemostat
It was a little tedious but used this instrument to manually remove about 80% of the Turf algae. I followed up with scrubbing heavily dense areas with a plastic wire scrubber like this found at the hardware store:
I was able to.use the 24in hemostat to clamp into this small scrubber to get to some hard to reach places.
I'll continue to update my tanks progress. At least for now GHA Turf algae has stopped growing. Not seeing regrowth. There are very small patches that I cant scrub that still remain but look to not be growing at all.
Thx for reading.
.
I've thrown a bunch of ideas against the wall seeing what sticks. These past 3 weeks the GHA Turf has stopped growing
Here are the things I threw at the tank and really not sure what may have been the answer:
* Removed all red light from my lighting system. I custom build my own LED lights and was pushing about 10% red light around 1-2hrs a day. I pulled all my lighting and resoldered 420nm blue light diodes where the red light diodes were. I also reduced all full spectrum white diodes down to 2 white diodes per my 4 LED fixtures. I'm now pushing 400nm, 420nm, 440nm blues/UV as my MAIN lighting source. Each fixtures has, idk, 30-40 3w diodes. Everyone one of the fixtures has all 400-440nm diodes except 2(two) 520nm green diodes and 2(two) bright white diodes. ZERO red diodes, all reds are G.O.N.E. .... whites severely limited
* Filter socks. I watched BRSinvestigates and they did a study that if you religiously change your filter socks every 3rd day (if they need it or not) NO3/PO4 gets reduced by 40%. That's a big number.
* Running my Chateo pink/red plant grow light over my Chaeto 24/7. Heres the floodlamp style I'm using:
Found on Amazon under "Thinklux plant grow light"
* I have two Vortech mp40w and I have an Apex. Never married the two to manage the water flow. I bought the wireless Apex module to control my Vortechs. 3hrs before my light come on I BLAST the tank with my Vortechs at 100% Constant flow. This stirs the tank up quite a bit. But I mostly BB so very very little sand that I do have gets blown
around. But LR and coral do get a ton of flow flushing out junk.
* Running a very wet skimmer. My skimmer is now taking out about 1gal of skim a DAY. So the ATO is putting 1gal of RODI a day.... i'm premixing in gallon-jugs 1 gal of new SW a day. So in essence I'm doing a 1 gal WC a day via the skimmer exporting and my ATO and my new salt mix replacing the exported skim.
* Manual removal. I own two of these 2ft long stainless steel hemostats:
Found on Amazon under 24 in hemostat
It was a little tedious but used this instrument to manually remove about 80% of the Turf algae. I followed up with scrubbing heavily dense areas with a plastic wire scrubber like this found at the hardware store:
I was able to.use the 24in hemostat to clamp into this small scrubber to get to some hard to reach places.
I'll continue to update my tanks progress. At least for now GHA Turf algae has stopped growing. Not seeing regrowth. There are very small patches that I cant scrub that still remain but look to not be growing at all.
Thx for reading.
.
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