got some problems, long post, please advise...

[DarkDevil]

Hi everyone, I have my 10G for almost 2 months now, got a lot of problems since day one, made me want to quit....

 

let me state my tank parameter and equipment first, it's a 10G:

 

Ammonia/nitrite/nitrate all 0 (seachem test kit)

ph 8.0-8.2

 

millenium 2000 HOB filter with seachem phosphate/silicate remover and seachem de-nitratefying filter bags inside

1x96W PC 50/50 light

heater and powerheads

 

1.5" LS and 15+ lbs LR

 

1 six-lined wrasse

1 yellow watchman goby

1 emerald crab

4 red-legged/scarlet hermit crab

1 turbo snail

3 astra snails

 

pearl bubble

frogspwan

green staghorn (almost dead)

xenia

green star polyp

orange/green rim zoos

ricodia and various mushrooms

 

ok, problems came out after last time I went to buy some water from the water machine, I always thought those water are RO/DI so I used those instead, after that time, my staghorn start dying, the skin start to peel off, and got almost all bleached in 4 days, tried to frag it out, but all frag died also, now there are an outbreak of diatoms, green hair algae and red slime (cyano), the outbreak cause the frogspwan and the pearl bubble don't open anymore, at least not open to it's maximum size like before, the green star polyp don't come out anymore, cause I think the algae have covered the surface of them, all other corals are doing fine (I think), at least they "look" ok to me, oh and there are a lot of bubbles inside the sandbed, they constantly get out of the sandbed and shoot up to the top, it's a LOT.

 

ok, those are the problems, I know the diatoms outbreak is caused by overfeed and cause nitrate and phosphate/silicate to form and help them grow, but since I only feed a little a day and my nitrate is 0 and I got the phosphate/silicate remover, how come I still have a lot of their growth? same apply to hair algae and red slime, and the clean up crew isn't doing their job, they don't move as much now, they were when I first bought them from LFS, they all stand there now and watch all the algae blooming, I don't know, what else I missed out?

will the algae growth affect the "blowing up" of the frogspwan and the pearl bubble? coz if they still don't blow up, they will die eventually right? when the tank first cycle complete, I got some diatom outbreak, that was taken care of after a while and I got a LOT of copepods doing their jobs, seems now they are ALL GONE, I don't think my six-lined ate them all, the six-lined was intented to eat the outbreak of bristleworms a while back...

both fish are doing ok I think, at least I think...

oh and what are those bubbles flying up from the sandbed? I think it cause some problems also as those bubbles sometimes trap under or stick onto the live rock or corals, and there are little bubble all over the place.....

 

anyways, these are the problems that I can think of, hope someone can direct me to some possible solutions, and sorry for the long post, thanks

[tinyreef]

those ro machines seem to be the source of a lot of issues. not so much the inability of them to produce good water but rather the store personnel's inability to change/maintain the ro membranes.

 

suspect the water source, especially since you have a re-occurence of diatoms, i.e. new silicate source. if there wasn't a source the diatoms couldn't grow; cyano, dino or hair algae would dominate instead.

 

the six-line could easily decimate the pod pop of a 10g. it could probably do it within a week's time in fact, so that's probably what happened to the pods.

 

the bubbles could be either the LS doing its job and denitrifying the nitrates into gaseous N2. or it could be algae generating O2. the diatoms could be mistaken for dinoflagellates, which in turn are generating this O2.

 

again, suspect the water source imo. changes, especially bad changes, when all other parameters are held the same or factored out usually point to source water issues ime. hth

[DarkDevil]

ok, thanks for the reply, forgot to add, I had done a water change again last night, using filtered tap water, not the machine water any more, it was perfect till this morning until the lights went on, then the brown thing start spreading again, anyways, if it's not diatom and if the brown substance is dino, should I worry about it? it's really taking over the tank, the whole tank looks brown now, and the pearl bubble totally went back into its skelton, coz lots of brown substances and tiny air bubbles are on it, I just check the water para just before I type this, the Ph is at 8.2 and NO2 and NO3 are all 0, I just stirred the sandbed, it's looks kind of clean now, but there are LOTs of brown thing on my star polyp, and it have not come out for days now... I think it will die soon...... anyways.....

[tinyreef]

i'm assuming that's the AP tap water filter you're talking about. not one of my favorite devices but some swear by them.

 

the brown stuff, is it slimey or dust looking? a pic would do wonders here. if it is dinos you have to suck them out bit by bit basically. a siphon via air tubing is the easiest and effective ime.

 

nitrate and nitrite readings can sometimes register low and still be feeding the system as the bio-system immediately utilizes it. e.g. there's still ammonia in all our systems (the fish/livestock don't stop peeing all of a sudden at the end of the cycling), it's just that the bene bacteria processes it so quickly that we never get a reading. same concept for efficient microalgae such as dino, cyano, or slime. these organisms are actually very efficient and outcompete for the nutrients/wastes.

 

i'm still suspicious of your water or at least the residual effects of it. i would consider true ro/di or distilled water to do your wc's for the next few weeks. $0.50~$1/gall is not more expensive than your livestock (only speaking nano-wise). i would do 10%~25% wc's for the next few days. (there's actually a splinter group that condones almost 100% wc's but i ain't a radical and you're not up the creek yet ) with the successive wc's (w/good water) and siphoning out the algae, whatever it is, you should see an improvement imo.

 

do not 'cheap' on the water quality, otherwise you might as well not even do wc's. (that radical group i am a member of )

[SteveC]

It's also worth mentioning that the "bristleworm outbreak" your six-line wrasse took care of might have been taking care of a lot of the detritus that's now decomposing into nutrients for the algae. The current view on bristleworms is that 99% of them are good guys. Even if they're a little creepy.