Various upflow growth pictures

[SantaMonica]

Customer's DROP1.4 scrubber in saltwater. Note the LEDs are strong enough to penetrate through the growth, so they never get grown over. Also note the strings help fill in the middle section with growth. And lastly note that there is more than enough water circulation inside; the small holes on the bottom of the scrubber is all that is needed or wanted (any bigger, and snails would get inside).

When this fills in more, you would harvest (clean) by reaching in and pulling out the growth. For freshwater cleaning on DROP's without strings (like the 1.2 or 1.2x) the growth is too slimy to grab so you take to your sink for a brushing (or open it and let the fish and snails eat!)...

[SantaMonica]

This customer's SURF2 or 2x or 2xx shows a mix of cyano, white slime, and some green slime. Might be some green hair in there also. All of this absorbs nutrients out of the water. Especially the slime, which absorbs the most but it must be cleaned/harvested before it lets go and flows out of the drain holes

This should be brushed out in a sink, with running water, so that the white Green Grabber textures and strings are visible again. About every 7 days is good in this person's case. Black slime would be more often; green hair could be less. But the idea is to time it so you harvest the most.

[SantaMonica]

This customer's SURF8 is growing nice, and sits in a large sump outside his house. The picture of the red light is one of the two lights on the SURF8. Note the salt on top of the lights; the lights are completely hermetically sealed and can be pushed under water to wash the salt off; don't try that with unsafe metal-frame lights... see LEDsafety.org

[SantaMonica]

Customer's HOG3 or 3x or 3xx in a back compartment, at night. Gives a pleasant red glow.

[SantaMonica]

Customer's SURF2 or 2x or 2xx in saltwater. This is a mix of some green hair, and some slime. It's not the most growth you can get, and it's not filling up too much here, but it's still filtering a medium amount. Cleaning of the white Green Grabber rock textures probably needs to be by a toothbrush, in a sink, because it's not quite thick enough to grab and pull out. And when in the sink, cleaning of the white Green Grabber strings should be by your fingers, because you don't want the brush to get stuck in them.



Actually, it looks like he was indeed able to just pull it out:



You can tell it's the same scrubber because of the white corner in bottom-right of the first photo, which is the same white corner in the top-left of the second photo. So, if you can reach in an pull it out, do so, but a good cleaning in your sink once every two months is still good to show the white surfaces again (reflects more light) and to kill pods too.

[SantaMonica]

This is a nice Holiday-colored growth; this customer's HOG3 or 3x or 3xx in saltwater has green slime on the outer portion, and red slime in the middle portion. This is very rare, because green usually results from more light, not less, and the outer portion on these Green Grabber® textures would have less light (because the LED lights are in the middle).

Now, what might have happened is that the customer was indeed getting green thick growth in the middle but did not clean/harvest it for some reason. This could have shaded some of the deeper growth layers there in the middle, causing some die-off which caused higher nutrients in the shallow layers, and this may have caused the darker/red growth. Just a guess, since no more information is available.

Regardless, all this growth of any color still pulls nutrients out of the water, and stays attached to the Green Grabber textures because the rocky texture are very rough like rocks on a beach, which is where natural algae/seaweed has learned to attach...

[SantaMonica]

For freshwater folks, this customer has 2 of our HOG2 scrubber® units; one for each FW tank. This one had very thick dark growth, even with 24 hours of light, pulling out lots of nitrate and phosphate from the water. Since the nutrients were still coming out quickly from the water and into the growth, the growth stayed dark:



Here is a closeup; this is not mud! This is algal growth, and growth this thick in freshwater is rare because FW is usually very easy to grow, and is usually bright green Cladophora or Spirogyra species:



Like most all FW scrubbers, you'll need to scrape this in your sink, then brush it out under running water, so that you see the white Green Grabber® surfaces again. This will allow the most light possible to reflect off of the white, which will grow lighter colored growth even in high nitrate and high phosphate water.

[SantaMonica]

A lot more people are starting to use algae scrubbers for freshwater. But back to saltwater. This is a customer's HOG1 or 1x in saltwater... you can't tell which one because the Green Grabber rocks are the same on both; only the lights are different (X mean Xtra led's) and you can't see how many led's there are. Also, this is not packed green hair algae, and it is not black slime; it is somewhere in the middle... sort of a light green slime which still absorbs nutrients out of the water as long as you harvest it by brushing it out in your sink. Overall it's a compact little area to keep algae in, so less algae grows in your tank.

[SantaMonica]

Another one for freshwater: This HOG.5 in a guppy tank makes food that is fed back to the guppies. Filtering and feeding all in one...



Video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STzPzSJL454

[SantaMonica]

This saltwater customer's SURF2 or 2x is growing and filtering well, but notice the yellow in the middle. This is where there are fewer air bubbles because this SURF model has two bubble entrances; more on the sides, but not in the middle. The air bubbles bring water in, and with the water comes nutrients, especially iron. Iron helps the growth stay dark green.

The growth here is thick enough to keep the bubbles from flowing to the middle, and so the middle does not get enough iron this week in this scrubber. A good cleaning/harvesting will do wonders (will open up the bubble pathway), as will feeding anything with iron such as nori or veggie pellets.