I have a new tank. I have clean up crew in only. I need help identifying what this is so I can figure out how to go about fixing the problem. Here are some pictures:







Any help is appreciated, thanks.

looks like a bunch of diatomes(brown) and some cyanobacteria(purple). What are your parameters and when/how much was your last water change? When did you add your cleanup crew?

Your tank is over 5 weeks old, so that stuff should start clearing out, probably just need to keep up on your water changes and let your cleaners take care of business, and be patient.

+1 to that

it's a new tank - totally normal to have an algae bloom. give it a month and it'll eat up the excess nutrients (stay on top of your weekly water change) and die off. the CUC will also take care of it.

patience

also, do you still have bioballs in the back chambers? if so, get those out.

That stuff will go away. This hobby requires time and patience. Nothing happens fast in a reef and when it does, things tend to die.

Don't let this taint your appreciation for reefing, it will get better with proper maintenance. What does your CUC look like? Get some snails and hermits in there and it will be gone.

To enjoy this hobby you must not get to worked up. Dont sweat the small stuff. If your tank isn't leaking water, and even if it is it can be fixed if you take a few deep breaths and think. This is my wisdom, and it took many times of looking at my tank and seeing something "bad" and resorting to extremes of chemicals and resins. Most of the time I think tanks do what they need to do to survive and we are the ones that stop that from happening.

+1

Soon your algae will be undercontrol, and there is alot of information regarding treatment for it, but it is just part of the breakin period. What kind of tank is it and lighting or did I miss that? I love setting up new tanks they have so much potential. Make a plan on what you want you tank to look like, try to avoid impulse buys and research, I think it is half the fun. Good Luck.

My most recent parameters:
pH: 8.4
SG: 1.025
Ammonia: 0
Nitrates: 20
Nitrites: 0
Last WC: Feb 24, 20% (4 gallons)
Cleanup crew added: Jan 26 (after a week of all 0s)



bioballs were never used




I have snails/hermits




It's a BC29 with stock lighting, waiting for my LEDs to get shipped from nanotuners.. ;]

You can always check out my signature, I try to keep it updated as often as I can on what I have done (mods) and added to tank, thanks.

Are you using tap or RO water?

RO/DI, tds meter reads 000ppm

Like others have said, your tank is still cycling. If the algae is bothering you, cut down on the amount of time your lights are on. As a matter of fact you can leave them off for a couple of days since you don't have any corals yet.

That is dinoflagellates, for sure. I have fought outbreaks of them twice in my reefing career, in my previous 20 gallon tank.

That tank had Caribbean live rock, which eventually proved to be full of unwanted hitchhiking macroalgaes, that only cropped up after many months. I say all this because I believe that rock, while beautiful and all, was what promoted the blooms of dino in the tank.

All that having been said, I found, in the end, that the only cure was traditional BRP - Best Reefing Practices - just as franklypre, SoCalDude and DHaut have said. BUT - dinos is the worstest of the worst, as far as I have encountered. It took a long time of diligent maintenance to beat it back, both times. I used high-quality carbon, GFO, siphoned out as much as I could when I did water changes, reduced my lighting period to four hours, ran the hell out of my skimmer, fed very little so that NO FOOD was left and little poop was produced, made sure my refugium and chaeto were in prime shape, etc.

Eventually it disappeared!

PS - Here's a positive side to it - once you do get rid of it, you KNOW your tank environment is excellent!

this hobby is a lot of waiting

I ran home and shut off lights, I will be going out of town for a few days, I am wondering what it will look like when I return home...




What high-quality carbon do you recommend, not sure if chemi-pure elite/purigen counts so would I swap one out for that??

GFO?

I have just completely shut off lights, all I have is CUCs, they probably prefer darkness anyway. My skimmer is chugging along... I feed very lightly.. I may have to trim up my chaeto soon.

The chemi-pure elite is a good sub for carbon. You can run both chemi-pure and purigen together, many do.

GFO is granulated ferric oxide. Itis used to remove phosphates, which is a contributor to algae growth. If you use the elite version of chemi-pure, this should be enough. However, after saying that, I use Rowa-Phos in addition to chemi-pure elite.

Keep us posted on how things look when you get back.

Chemi-Pure Elite is high-quality carbon plus GFO, so that's perfect. I don't see how Purigen enters into this chemistry, and I had a bad experience once when trying to reuse a "recharged" bag of it, so I'm not fan.

My only gripe with things like Chemi-Pure is the cost. I switched to the products from Bulk Reef Supply. The cost savings are tremendous.

After days of being in the dark, I would like to introduce my new pretty tank...

FTS


ROCKS


MY NEW FRAG RACK


ANOTHER FTS


Thanks, my lights are back on, I wonder if it will stay clean looking or not?

Nicely done.

Well, I'll be dipped...

Good post.

So now you can appreciate the hobby, nice work. My grandpa always told me" you gotta be dumb enough to listen and smart enough to follow through" Might have been the other way around anyway enjoy your tank add fish and coral slowly.

+1

I went out of town and had my lights off for 4 days... There wasn't a hint of algae when I got back anywhere. All of it died.

The corals were all fine.