light near sump for plants

[teejaybee]

Howdy,

I have a tank on a cabinet with the sump concealed underneath.

My sump is divided into 3 even sections.

My sump has two inlets into separate trickle style chambers. In the third chamber, where the return pump is, I would like to put some plants to make use of all that nitrate floating around (regardless of whether it will make any major difference to water chemistry - I just want to do it to have some plants I can watch grow in the whole bio-life-cycle - maybe a bristlenose or such or a few freshwater shrimp to feast on other deposits down there - they can't go in the main tank).

I need to put a light over the top of this third section of the sump so the plants grow. I've read in several articles on the bacteria that colonise your medium, that it isn't adversely affected by light. I've dealt with sumps in open areas (eg. in a lit shed) before and they work fine. Waste water treatment plants also have their biological setups similar to sumps out in open light (obviously layers below the top would get no light). I was wondering if anyone has done this before and have they encountered any problems. A problem I can see is algae growth interfering with the biological cycle (eg. algae growing on some of the rock exposed to light and on the glass near the rock, causing no bacteria to grow on that site or be able to get water flow over it). I can possibly glue some black perspex to the side of one chamber that will recieve the most light from the artifical light source. I don't see a problem with the rest of the clear glass sides growing too much algae as they wont get very direct light.

I plan on using a small (2ft or compact) flouro over this third section.

Is algae growing on your medium bad? Can the bacteria that is involved in the whole cycle function with algae growing ontop of it?

None of my chambers are geared towards anaerobic bacteria types that utilise nitrate. I may think about adding a denitrate filter at a later stage, but it's not up the top of my list of things that are desperately needed.

Any thoughts are appreciated.

(did a quick search through the site but no useful results that I could see)

[wui39]

Intereting idea. I'm not sure whether these would be similar put I have seen Marine ppl use a refugium next to their normal filtration sump or skimmer.

I'm not sure about the algae competing with the bacteria, although my guess would be if the algae is on the media, the bacteria will not have the surface area to colonise exclusivly.

[patchy]

i've heard of people using plants in their large sump water catchment areas and i havent heard of any adverse affects however i have not directly done this myself, just reading off the net and talking to people.

[Ash]

same as above, I have heard of remote plant filtration but haven't actually done it yet (Of course all heavily planted tanks work this way & the "filters" are just mechanical & water movement).

One thing I have done however, is had algae grow on a filter.

One of my tanks has an AC300 with a fluro co-incidentally right over the spillway, the spillway fills with green algae pretty quickly as does the top sponge. I clean them both weekly & remove this algae from the system. The thing is, this tank has the lowest nitrate readings of any of my tanks (other than a heavily planted tank) even though it is quite heavily stocked & doesn't have any denitrification coils or anything else going on.

Basically I believe it is working as an algal scrubber (Click for an article on TheKrib)

In a sump however, you won't be able to harvest the algae as easily, so you might be better off blacking out the media chambers as you suggested.

Check out this article on the Krib about plants as filters --> Click me

[teejaybee]

Thanks for the info! The stuff on the krib was pretty helpful, although now it puts me in a bit of a spin. Plants can use nitrite and ammonia more easily than nitrate. But since the water is passing through my medium in the trickle system first I guess that means they get first pickings at it and it kinda forces the plants into more nitrate use.

I've had some crazy ideas about putting plants in the sump and slim shadying up something where frogs can live in there too. I'm not sure if they'll like the water chemistry that tropheus like. I'm also not sure that frog poo in the water will be a good thing (they do pretty big nasty looking poos).

It would be nice though... put glass doors on the cabinet and whatnot so you can see in... look in on a big biocycle in process. In my opinion, it would be extremely cool to have something like this setup.

I'd also like to see if a fully planted sump with as large an arrangement of plant life as I can fit in there would be either as effective or more effective as the bacteria doing the job in the trickle system. I'm soon going to have two identical systems so I may test this theory (although I don't know about using tropheus as the test species and since I need to get them in there asap it may only be feasable at a later date)

The downside is extra power usage for lighting (although there's always running this off a solar cell or similar into a battery blah blah blah if you want to get picky), but the upside is you can sell the plants off as they overgrow the system. Whether this outways the power usage I have yet to calculate.

Argh.

[ppanther]

Further to this, there are some non-aquatic plants that extremely efficient at mopping up nitrates and extra nutrients. If you replant one of these with inert soil and place the pot in the outlet you can get some great results.

The only thing to keep in mind about this is that non-aquatic plants seem to be a lot more efficient at mopping up the nutrients - so if you have other plants in your aquarium you will need to make sure you continue to add trace chems and ferts.

In my sump for my 5ftx2ftx2ft I have one of those carnivorous Venus Fly Traps sitting in its pot on top of a brick (water is too deep for it alone). Venus Fly Traps are swamp plants and requite a lot of moisture so I did this more to save having to water the damn thing every day - however since doing that the growth on it has been excellent. And of course growth = abosbed nutrients.