Hi All,
I'm hoping you can give us some answers as to why our algae scrubber is not doing .. well .. anything.

We have a 300lt + sump tank with 2 LED radion lights hung at 8 inches from water surface running at 100% intensity. There are currently only 3 live fish, a Tang and 2 Ocellaris who breed regularly, 3 Peppermint shrimp, 1 Strombus snail, a couple of surviving snails, 1 very annoying elusive mantis shrimp and even nastier mollusc eating worm.. Not a lot in there as we want to first get the algae and pesky hitchhickers out.

Anyway, we tried to tackle the algae with the algae scrubber, that was back in early December, it is now April and the algae is just getting worse.
The light of the algae scrubber was on 18 hours a day at first but didn’t get full coverage of plastic mesh, after lurking on the site and reading as much as I could I then cut the hours back to 8 to allow even growth. The algae never grows completely over the mesh, there is always a spot in the middle that remains clear (see photo).

Any advice would be welcome as my partner is wanting to throw it out and go back to a conventional refugium.