Quote:
Originally Posted by
florida joe 
Oh now I understand, you had an algae problem due to high nitrates you assumed. You then decided to employ a turf scrubber to deal with the nitrates. The scrubber was not getting good growth because you felt that it was getting out competed by the algae in your DT even though it was getting the first shot at nutrient water via the flow over the screen. So you then were told to feed more, introducing more organics to further increase your nitrates. Now with all this added” food” you were able to grow enough algae on the screen to out compete the tank (the screen was getting nutrient water constantly as opposed to the algae in your DT.)Now on to the corals, you are maintaining corals that need target feeding I assume by your post. You feel that it is wiser to feed extra fish food in the hopes that your fish will not eat it and it will degrade to the point where it will be small enough for your corals to eat? And as your state you see no down side to over feed fish.
So the bottom line if I understand this right is to increase the bio load to feed the screen to decrees the high nitrates that cause the algae to grow in your tank. umm call me crazy but and this is just off the top of my head what if you addressed the initial reason for the algae growth in your tank which may have been high nutrients in the first place.
If you are reffering to constant water changes, minimal feedings and a good skimmer and some cheato. As I said before, I was doing this. 10% water change per week every single week, cheato, and only feeding about 1/8 of a cube of food every 3 days. my nitrates were always 20-40 phos hovered around .25.
So I guess if I have to feed in excess with no ill results to get a good phos and trate reading then I am going to do that.
Besides, how many on here are afraid to feed to much because they know the result will be an ammonia spike, phos spike or trate spike or all of the above? It's fun to feed fish, I would think everyone can agree on that.
So if you could feed as much as you want and have solid water parameters I guess I don't see the downside. I'm a very firm believer in the scrubbers as I've seen what they can do.
I think maybe what people don't realize is that growing Algae in your tank has no chance against growing algae on a screen. once the screen grows in it will easily out compete even the worst hair algae problems. The reason for this is the lack of water the light has to penetrate to get to the place where it can easily grow algae. On a scrubber there is no water penetration just a light waterfall over a screen, The lights are closer than the lights on the DT. The algae in the tank may get first crack at it, but that algae isn't getting the amount of light or the O2 that the scrubber gets.
The only downsides I've noticed to the scrubber is it's a bit noisy unless you fully enclose it (which I plan to do someday when I have some spare time) And you have to clean it once a week (takes approx 5 mins)
Upsides, keeps food in the tank to feed other things, exports loads of nutrients once a week, maintains solid parameters, grows mass amounts of pods, far less expansive than other forms of filtration, DIY which is always fun and rewarding, clean your glass far less often (I clean once every week to week and a half on the front glass), mixes a lot of O2 with the water, feed as much as you want. I'm sure I'm missing some others.
I'm making a real small one for my QT coral/invert/LR tank as well should be fun :)
I'm not maintaining any corals that would actually require spot feeding no. But it is my understanding that all corals pull something in the way of food from the water, some more than others.
I have a couple acros, leathers, montis, frog spawn, duncans, galaxia, zoas, xenia, mushrooms, some green encrusting thing I can never remember the name of and more kenya trees than anyone in the world would care to have in one tank :)
