I have been wanting to try a Chaetomorpha reactor for a while and recently got the RO Light Reactor.
I have been running a refugium with Chaetomorpha and it has become a mess. It really is just a detritus trap and the detritus settles on the bottom of the fuge. It is really hard to clean or siphon out with all the little pieces of Chaeto on the bottom. Also the little pieces of chaeto start getting caught in the trap causing the water level to rise in the refugium area. They also get caught in the skimmer compartment trap and they get into my skimmers needle wheel causing the water levels to change in my skimmer. I like running different algae’s in my systems to help with biodiversity. I believe it helps combat bad algae’s like dinoflagellates, hair or cyanobacteria.
Another issue with a fuge is the light spills into other areas of the sump causing algae and especially in my skimmer (See picture below).
So hopefully this reactor solves allot of the problems. You can see in the pics how bad the bottom of the sump was with detritus and now how nice and clean it looks with the new reactor.
The quality is really nice and the red and white look very cool.
It came very well packed.
It comes with a Aquatrance 1200 Pump. It also comes with two barb fitting and two PVC slip fittings.
For more specifics on the light reactor see Coralvues website:
https://www.coralvue.com/reef-octopus-light-reactor
Set up was a breeze.
Also for a video on set up see their video:
I hooked mine up with red silicone tubing for the supply and hard plumbed the output.
I think it would look pretty slick with red PVC piping and white elbows. I used just white because that is what I had.
If you can afford it and have the room I would go for the larger reactor, this would allow for more algae to grow before having to remove it. The main disadvantage of the light reactor is it must be removed from the sump to remove the algae. With a refugium you can just reach in and grab a hand full of algae and throw it out.. It is a trade off and I think it will actually be much less maintenance overall with the light reactor. It will be much easier to clean the refugium compartment because it won’t be trapping all the detritus and all the little pieces of chaeto. I won’t have to clean out the protein skimmer of algae or the little pieces of cheato that get trapped in the needle wheel. I won’t have to continually remove the algae from the compartment divider fins and the salinity levels will stay much more stable because the fins in the sump wont clog with cheato.
With the reef Octopus Light Reactor the sump looks neat and clean and I like that, maybe a little OCD.
You can actually see the algae in the reactor so I should be able to tell when it needs to be harvested. It is a pretty cool effect the way the reactor grows.
I added a little iron, phosphate, and nitrogen to help kick start the reactor, all things algae require to grow. If your cheato is getting light in color try some iron and maybe a little iodine. My nutrients are pretty low and I will put up exactly what they are when I test them here.
I would like to update the thread every few weeks a for a while to let people know how the different algaes are growing. I added Chaetomorpha in two compartments and in the other I added caulerpa racemosa.
I will be running on reverse daylight to help with PH drop at night.
In this picture you can see my current refugium lighting:
In this picture you can see the detritus in the bottom of my sump.
Algae in my skimmer from light spilling over from my current refugium.
Plumbed:
Two type of algae added:
In the sump.
In this picture you can see how clean the bottom of my sump is now.
www.reef2reef.com
