Just an idea and I am sure someone has thought of this already but: What if you sold algae scrubber units with the screen already broken in with growth? I am not sure if it is okay to ship that because it would be shipping something biological but it would be neat to be able to buy a turbo scrubber and pull the already greened screen from a plastic bag and throw it in right away. Any thoughts?
I've been asked many times, it's really a matter of having things set up to do that, and it's kinda low on the priority list. One of the issues is that a 'starter' screen won't necessarily stay alive in the destination tank. You would think it makes no difference, but there are cases where you could take a mature/cured screen and put on a different tank, and the screen will completely die off and you will essentially start over. Let's say for instance that you have a scrubber that you set up and ran for 4 months before you got an appreciable growth. If you took a screen that was packed with algae right from the start, there is a good chance that if you started with a mature screen, that algae would have died back quite a bit. You might be able to skip over the first few weeks of "slime-ing up" (diatom stage) but that's about it. Of course, there will be many cases where a mature screen would grow gangbusters right from the start in a different tank. I would think that one could at least get a 2 week jump start past the initial break-in stages, but that's probably all I could guarantee. Once I get things set up so that I am not manually fabricating every part of every scrubber, I might be able to turn my attention to items like this (and ship overnight in a flat envelope, at least within the CONUS)
