I built my gfo and carbon reactor this morning. It seems to be working. The water is moving through the chambers gently rolling the medias around as it passes over them. My question is however. I have phosguard in the gfo chamber at the moment. It's made by seachem which in my experience is a good company. It removes phosphates and silicate from the water column. Is this the same, better, or worse than running gfo? It does the same thing. So I figured I'd give it a shot since none of my lfs carry gfo. And with all the green hair algae gone thanks to the lawnmower blenny and coral beauty if phosphates start rising I had to get this running. Depending on the out come I will either continue with this product or just order gfo.... anyone else have anything to share regarding this product vs. Gfo?
gfo vs the other leading products..
- Thread starter kstyle13
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Water flows in the bottom of the gfo side. Rolling it as it goes up through the u at the top then down through the carbon and out of the bottom of the pipe. There is filter Floss at the intake in the u section and at the output so none of the media can mix or get pushed out of the unit
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All it is is a t12 sleeve cut into section. The tube comes with caps that have a hole for the pins. I put flexible tubing from the pump into the cap. The I used 2 one inch pvc elbows, a small piece of 1 inch pvc to connect the elbows and a 1 1/4 pvc cap with holes drilled to allow water drainage. Filter Floss to keep media in its compartment. Really simple but very effective. My total cost was $20 bucks. 16 of that being the pump. It's a 50 - 80 gph pump from lowes.
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I will say you are quite industrious with all your DIY projects. Good job. I don't understand how you went through a hair algae incident with such a young tank though. Did you introduce the HA somehow??
Yes. It was 100 percent my fault with the hair algae. The very first piece of live rock had a small amount on it. I didn't know what it was and thought it was cool. That was my first mistake. Then I added 177 pounds of live rock and let my tank cycle with just the live rock. Next a introduced some hermits and a damsel. After I was finished cycling of course. Then added some seachem stability. Just feeding the hair algae. I ran one 6500 k bulb for a week or so until I got my metal halides. That did nothing but fuel the algae. Then when I introduced some corals there was ha on them. Before I knew it I was overrun. I had a vast flowing wall of gha on the back of the tank. I will say that the lawn mower blenny lived up to his name. There isn't a strand to be found. Lol
The secret to diy projects is not to build something that works. But to understand how the project your building works. Without full comprehension of how it works and why it works you'll never get a good diy design. That's why research is key. Off the wall questions and really digging deep into the inner mechanics of something is a must in diy projects. I went through 3 different designs with my skimmer before I figured it out. This was because I was just doing. I didn't stop to figure out why and how. Same with the reactor.
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Just a tip... I would have made the dual reactor able to have two different flow rates. Again, GFO needs to be run at a different flow rate in most cases than carbon. (There are some tricks around this but they need to be accounted for) But otherwise, looks good.
With that being said let me add that the carbon is on the output side. It's losing gph just in shear water volume of pushing up the 1 inch pipe the gfo is right by the highest flow area and the carbon in the low flow. Gfo being able to tumble softly while the carbon sits snug with water flowing over it
