I have been running my algae scrubber for about a week and am starting to see some light green in the white area of the scrubber. There also was a thin amount of green algae on the glass where the scrubber was. I have a clownfish, peppermint shrimp, emerald crab, turbo snail (that doesn't eat much. I question if it is a turbo snail.), two blue-legged hermit crabs, three nassarius snails, an astrea snail and about 12 to 14 pounds of live cured rock in a 10 gallon tank. The tank has been up for a little under 3 months. I switched everything from a 14 gallon biocube to a jbj rl-10-fp after about two months. I had some green algae growth and had gone through diatoms in the biocube and now I am seeing continued growth of green algae and two other bad kinds of algae. The other algae is greyish purple with strings coming up here and there and is pretty securely attached to the sand. There is another patch of this that is kind of brownish pink maybe. There are diatoms on the glass and the green hair algae is mainly on the rocks. I run a nano remora skimmer with mj600 pump, filter floss and chemipure blue in jbj's 75 gph filter and the algae scrubber. I do 25% water changes each week with petco's imagitarium water and feed a small amount of mysis shrimp to the clownfish and two scrapes off of a regular shrimp to my peppermint shrimp. I had copepods and amphipods in the biocube and have significantly less since the switch.
My water parameters are all fairly normal with 10 to 15 ppm of nitrate, phosphate somewhere below .25, temp 77, salinity about 1.025, kh 10.5, calcium 420, magnesium about 1200.
My question is, does seeing a light green in some of the cracks of the grabber surface sound about right? The scrubber light is currently on 18 hours from 4 pm to 10 am. Thank you.