idea on screen roughness

[DesignsOnline]

Keep us posted on this one, it looks very interesting.
(In fact if you were able to take a photo diary of it that would be even better...)

[Gigaah]

I could do that. However I'm using LED lights and at this point the general consensus is that my light should include red. I'm all warm white. So that will impact the situation. It will be difficult to derive any real meaningful info from the observations. Even the number of watts in LED is up for debate..and the lumens per watt on LED also wildly vary from manufacture to manufacturer and generation of LED even.

I'll start taking pictures once growth appears.

Day 1: zero growth

[Gigaah]

Day 2. Zero growth

[Floyd R Turbo]

You may not be able to see the growth. The first week or two is what I call the 'slime up' period, where you generally get brown diatom growth that forms a layer to which the GHA can better anchor. At least that's my theory.

[Gigaah]

Day 3. Nothing. I seem some specs in the screen. But i'm not sure if its algae or just particulate.

[Gigaah]

Day 4: Definitely some yellow greenish color specs on the screen

[Floyd R Turbo]

Just out of curiosity, how heavy is that screen???

[Gigaah]

I have not weighted it. I suppose I could when I clean it....

Its fairly light. Certainly not heavy enough to be concerned about weight. The algae growth on a mature screen far exceeds the weights of this screen dry.

[Floyd R Turbo]

I was just curious, because it looks like it's pretty thick. Maybe that's just the picture fooling me. I was thinking that you could just sprinkle the screen very lightly and that would be plenty good to get it rough enough. Using the aragonite sand is a great idea, if your tank runs out of CO2 then the algae could potentially start pulling carbonate from the screen itself, at least until it exhausts it.

[akando]

maybe i should make one for the other half of an SM-100 and see what it does...I like the idea.