Fuge Flow

[Madreefer]

I have a 20G fuge with a Rio600 at one end and a MJ1200 at the other side keeping some gracilia (cant spell it) tumbling. There is two piles of live rock rubble for pods. I don't see any pods anymore, could this be too much flow? I still see my mandarin picking at the rocks constantly in my display and he is fat. Just concerned 'cause I no longer see pods in fuge. Noticed this change when I added the Rio in and removed caulepra.

[Dolf]

If the main idea of the fuge is to grow pods I would cut the flow considerably. I think that around 5X turnover is what is recommended. On a twenty gallons you have a maximum of 500 gallons flowing through it. I don't have the graph and do not know how high you are pumping the water, so I can't say what your true flow is, however, it would seem to not be the ideal conditions for pods. Having said that, you will likely still have some, just nowhere near as many with that high turnover.

[Madreefer]

Thanks. I really don't know what the pump pushes in to the fuge. It's an internal from the bottom of a rock pile in my sump with about 3ft of headloss and the back of the fuge is drilled and it drains back in to the sump. I took out the MJ1200 so I'll see how it turns out. I just wanted to keep my macro algae moving around.

[mark]

I've got a 20g LR/macro fuge with about 300gph from one of the display drains and a power head for about another 300gph.

Never really had a lot of pods on the LR but the Chaeto is crawling with them. Figure part reason I don't see a lot is my fuge is lit 24/7.