algae reactor help

[Eddie7144]

need some help. i made a diy algae reactor about 5 weeks ago, I made with a tlf 550 reactor and I used these lights. Elflight LED Plant Grow Strip Light(Power Adapter Included),5050 Waterproof Full Spectrum Red Blue 4:1 Growing Lamp Aquarium Greenhouse ,the thing is my cheato is not growing. my nitrates are at 10 and my phosphates are at 1.0/ .9 did u get the wrong lights ? should I have gotten the accel warm led lights instead ?

 

[Halostemanic]

My DIY reactor has been running for around 10 months. Initially it took a while to dial in. I'll give you my observations and you can take from them what you will. For what's it worth I think your light is fine but I just used a plain old white LED waterproof strip.

1) My nitrates starting point was 15 & PO4 was 1.0
2) For me initially there was a correlation between the flow and the photo period. If the flow was too strong I didn't get good growth and if the photo period was too short it was the same thing. No growth.
3) if the photo period was too long I got hair algae smothering the cheato.
--- so it took about 5 weeks of trial and error but I settles on 10 hrs photo period and about 350l/h thruput.

4) Once I had this set I noticed that the algae bed grew well for about 2 months then growth slowed down. I am running triton so I checked over all my previous results and realised that manganese and iodine values were being depleted. So no I supplement them in my dosing system.

After about three months of settling in my nitrates are steady a <2ppm and my PO4 is at .03ppm. I run rowphos in a reactor if I see the Po4 rising for some reason but I haven't had to do that in 3 months. It's a 2l refactor and I remove 1.5l of compact cheato every 4 weeks without fail.

Hopefully this helps a bit,

 

[Eddie7144]

thanks for the info, it may be a water flow issue, will tinker with it and see how it goes, thanks !