I was just starting to get some decent growth and inadvertently left the pump to scrubber switched off for 24 hours. Now my screen has turned completely white, is it likely to recover or will it be like starting from scratch?
That sucks man, I has a fish die and block my pump and had almost the same thing happen. Scrape it all off, and give it a light brushing to get all the dead algae off. The good news though is that one reason the plastic screen by itself (no mortar) takes a while to get going is that it takes time for a calcified layer to build up, to which the algae anchors to better and better over time. You should still have that layer, so don't scrub it really hard with a stiff brush or rough it up again, just give it a good cleaning and maybe a once-over with a soft toothbrush, a good rinse, and put it back in use. Start with a shorter photoperiod, as if you were starting a new screen (9 hours/day for LED, maybe 12/day with CFL) and it should re-mature a little faster. Also I've found that when starting up a new screen in a tank that has already had a scrubber running on it, the screen tends to start up a bit faster. NOt sure exactly why, it's just what I've seen (a few others have seen this as well)
Cheers for that, i had just scraped the screen the night before and just had a nice thin spread of bright green on the screen so there's not much there now to scrape off, I'm still only lighting for 9 hours with leds anyway as i was just starting to get decent growth so I'll just leave it for now for a few days to see if it recovers. I'm really angry with myself for making such a stupid mistake...it won't happen again.
Just starting to get some growth again after 4 weeks, took 2 months initially to get going properly before the disaster with the pump.
