Recent research on ways to keep algae under control pointed me to algae scrubbers. Looked into a few videos & articles and I decided to give it a try.
I decided to have it sit over the refugium and gravity feed it via my emergency/second drain (herbie style). Picked up pipes & connectors from Lowes, a canvas from Joann & some zip ties… I made sure it has a screwing system so I could easily detach just the scrubber to clean it every week.
For the lights, I started with a 4k LED work light facing the front for few days…
Week 1 just had a lot of fish poop/brown dirt collect (no algae).
Then added a second hanging 2700k CFL hanging backlight and ran it until the end of second week.
Saw pretty good growth of green hair algae by mid second week. I decided to then swap the 4k LED with another 2700k CFL 2 days ago.
Today I removed the scrubber to clean it and here’s the crap that grew in just a week. I’ll report back next week to see if I see similar or more growth.
I also got some good advise from @
brleong as I was setting things up (he has an ATS too).