Doing my two week scrubber cleaning, and found a mix of GHA and a translucent growth that looks like pork fat. You can also see the pic of my screen where the white stuff was growing. Anyone know what im growing? Or, am I doing something wrong? See attached photos.
Did you work up to that level of intensity over the course of several months? How long between harvests?
It's odd, because your growth is a mixture of too much light and possibly not enough light I would back the intensity down to 2 o'clock Do you still have elevated nutrients and/or tank algae?
All the led’s are working. I’ve turned the lights down. I’m going to test my water today and post when I have time.
That's not horrible, but it could explain why your GHA was a bit dark. It doesn't explain the pork fat though. When you harvest, do you scrub the top edge of the screen and clean the slot pipe?
When I harvest the screen I am able to use a scrapper and the algae comes off in sheets, if that makes sense. It’s very dense. I don’t scrub the top edge of the screen. Then I clean everything thing else with a brush, slot pipe, growth chamber, false bottom etc.
Yes, that helps. That sounds like what you get under high-nutrient conditions sometimes...not always though. The density description tells me that you might have some light blocking going on, but it doesn't look that bad because 75% of the screen post-cleaning still has green. It's the weird white areas that are very odd. What I would do is an intermediate cleaning, or several. You want to allow that white area to fill in, and you want to deter any slimy growth. So let's say you have a 14 day growth cycle. Remove the screen at 5 and 10 days, give it a rub & rinse, don't scrub, then put it back in. At 14 days, do the same but add in a pass with the scraper, but only use a corner and remove growth in a # pattern on one side, X pattern on the other, and rinse again. Then continue to repeat that. The pork fat might be a phase. A very,very odd phase
Got it. I will clean the screen Thursday, which will be 5 days from when I posted the original photos. I'll take more photos and post them. Thanks Bud.
Pork fat is gone, there was a nice thick coat of dark GHA. I’m going to keep the light intensity and duration the same and see how it goes next week.
