Will it grow? Place your bets please; It certainly feels rough. If it does I'm gonna include it in my upcoming horizontal improvement.
I'm going to have a similar experiment pretty soon. I'm expanding on this idea by Gigaah on AS to bake sand onto the screen. PS Notice that the date of that thread and the posts within it pre-date SM's priority data for his "Appendages" PCT submission. Therefore, he cannot claim this as novetly. Free for all to use. I'm going to do this using pool filter sand, which is much finer. The idea is to create a very thin top layer of quartz sand on the screen. This is mainly so that I don't have to rough up screens anymore which is a total pain. However I don't know if it will work well for cleaning (it will be like sandpaper) or longevity of the screen itself, and it might require using a different material than the #7 plastic canvas. PS sorry for the total threadjack
If the CA bicarbonate mixture actually does grow, and it should, it will be embedded below the surface of the Perspex sheet (in a convention canvas shape to start with). This will allow the shearing action of cleaning in the sink whilst having "clear areas" of Perspex to ease the cleaning process. I'm planning on up lighting it to mitigate the problem of self shading at the screen surface which I mention occasionally. Hopefully the opaque nature of the mixture will allow enough penetration on the growing bits
I've got a whole series of growth pics but photobucket isn't liking the new IOS update so here's a pic of day 10;
Two days after the first harvest pic. I did notice that the high points created by the CA/Bicarbonate were actually nearly totally clean after harvest whilst the gaps in between were still populated. This would indicate that the design of the screen could be optimized to shear the algae off at a greater length which should facilitate faster regrowth, a bit like my "haircut test" on my waterfall scrubber. Early days though
