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Unread 07/08/2008, 06:03 PM   #46
SantaMonica
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Join Date: Feb 2007
Location: Santa Monica, California, USA
Posts: 2,511
I will indeed post results/efforts. Just ordered the pump and timer, and still trying to figure out how to order the seeded screen from IA. If not a seeded one, I'll use some of the examples from above.

Surge: I do like and understand the surge idea, even if it's just "filling the box up with a pump", but it just seems to introduce too many negatives for the small easily built unit that this is supposed to be. A real surge is just too difficult, but even a pumped fill-the-box technique means that algea will for sure cover the box as well as the screen (and cleaning the box will not be as easy, since it is small). So my first attempt is going to try to keep the box dry, while getting as much flow over the whole screen (no dead spots) as possible. Remember that tabletop waterfalls use the spraybar concept, and they are totally covered using very little flow. A side-benefit to the smallness of the unit is that it can easily be set on top the tank. You might not get lots of surge, but you'll get all the food from it.

By the way, in some further reading I just found out that not having alternating wet/dry/wet/dry cycles (in other words, an algae trough with no air) cuts processing by 50%. Thus, having the timer on the pump should allow the unit to be one-half of the size if it were continuous flow (i.e., no timer on the pump).


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