Thinking out loud again, Would it be a good idea to put a UV sterilizer inline to your algae scrubber? I'm thinking if you have an established screen (not when your first starting it up), an inline UV sterilizer could help prevent cyano or diatoms from starting to grow on your screen BUT since the UV isn't shining on the screen the algae will be perfectly fine. Bascially, the UV sterilizer would be used to prevent unwanted things from starting growth on your screen. Thoughts?
I would actually say no, because there is evidence that there is a symbiotic relationship between bacteria and algae, so you want bacteria to populate the screen. Think of the screen as a substrate for forming bacterial biofilms, similar to how Zeovit does this. With Zeo, you shake the container to break the biofilms and allow new bacterial films to form. With the scrubber, the surface area is always expanding, and then you clean it, removing the biofilms and starting the process over. This is not a highly studied concept but it is one that was brought up to me by someone with quite a bit of experience with biofilms and bacterial-based filtration systems such as biopellets. If you have only diatoms or cyano growing on your screen, I wouldn't think that UV ahead of the scrubber would prevent this. It's likely a setup/configuration issue with the scrubber.
