Top 3 reasons to quit SW FOREVER

[fawkes027]

1.) Your new clown dies for no reason. (water parameters were perfect)

 

2.) Your yellow tail damsel infects your show tank with Ich because you didn't have the room for a qt tank. It is now light blue from Ich.

 

3.) Your tank is covered in algae and you begin to wonder why you ever wasterd your money on snails and hermit crabs. Because they sure aren't doing what they're supposed to.

[harbingerofthefish]

1) you go out of town and you neighbor burns down your house due to dropping the lights in and running away.

 

2) your cat plays with the lion fish and the fish wins.

 

3) you finally realize you'd just be happier putting in neons in your minibow.

[fawkes027]

I could never keep neons alive either.

 

However, I seem to be doing quite a good job with my algae. Can't kill that.

[adinsxq]

1. you squish nudi's with your finger

2. you give your dog zoo goo water to drink

3. your name is *edited*

[fawkes027]

I'm not sure if you all are trying to cheer me up or not. However if you are, sorry, but I'm beyond laughing at the moment.

 

I'm wondering why I ever bothered trying SW. People warned me.

[Physh1]

1) tanks blows a serious leak and destroys a carpet.

2) tanks blows a huge leak and soaks a wall outlet causing a few issues

3) tank blows leak and poors all over new bed and destroys it.

 

I wonder how I know these?

 

They all stopped me for around 6 months and then I said screw it...I need another tank.

 

Cameron

[ross76053]

1) you're in an important group meeting at work, your boss asks you a question in front of your peers, and you're dumbfounded because you're wondering if the items you're selling on Ebay will cover the cost of the 30-cube you're about to buy.

 

2) a year ago you start your first tank....hair algae defeats you, causing you to sell all your equipment & make stupid comments like, "I'll never have another reef tank again"....today you're saving money for your next reef tank.

 

3) Tank - $250

Skimmer - $140

Lighting - $250

Live Rock - $200

Fuge - $110

Candy Cane - $45

Frogspawn - $40

GSPs - $25

Ricordea - $25

Snails - $15

Crabs - $30

 

1" hair algae covering all your livestock - Priceless

[fawkes027]

Man that sucks. I just don't think I want to start all over again.

 

If the fish with Ich dies, do I just wait the 6-7 weeks to wait out the lifspan of it? Or should I do water changes or what? I haven't any fish left.

 

And how do I get rid of my algae? I posted on RC but I didn't get much help. It's a reddish/brown with bubbles in places. It's everywhere. What can I buy that will actually EAT it? Because right now I have astrea snails and nessarius (sp?) snails and they're doing nothing. Have a few hermit crabs as well.

[ross76053]

Fawkes,

 

You sound like me six months ago. I had the same freakin' algae. I tried just about everything for my algae problem - I had some hair & the brownish bubbly crap you have now. Nothing will eat it when it gets to that point. Snails laugh at it, crabs play with it.

 

Here are the mistakes I made as I see them (hoping this might help you):

 

- I added too much livestock much too quickly....people here warned me about this, but no, I had to do it my way & add a full tank of corals after about four months. Stupid.

 

- I used RO water only - not RO/DI, which removes phosphates. The water in my city is naturally high in phosphates, so my RO didn't do much good. By the time I bought/used a DI add-on, the algae was full-grown & it was too late.

 

===

 

Don't sell yer stuff & let it break you. You'll miss it and want to come back to the hobby. If you need to do something drastic, start over. Get rid of your rock (donate it to the nearest ocean, LFS, etc.), clean yer tank out, and re-evaluate what might have caused your problem. Ask others what they do to successfully keep algae to a minimum.

 

Hope this helps....I'm there with ya pal.

 

Ross

[T?@7]

Originally posted by adinsxq

3. your name is *edited*

 

LOL. Ditto

[MrKrispy]

1) People ask if *blank* coral is an anemone

 

2) People ask if you can have shark-octopus-eel

 

3) Not enough time to stare at it!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

 

I can only come up with 1 reason to NEVER go to LFS again:

 

"oooooooOHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH NEMO!!!!!!"

[Chronicles]

Get rid of the fish with ich, put any other fish in a QT tank even a rubbermaid tub will work and treat them with your choice of ich removers. Get a phosphate sponge like phos-zorb and put it in. Make sure you're using RO/DI water. Clean and scrub your walls, decrease lighting, and stir up your sand. Ever think of buying macro algae to compete with your problem algae? You never said how old your tank is, if it's not that old yet what you're dealing with is normal. Run your skimmer if you have one, if not do water changes every week to get the nutrents out of the water.

 

My tank is under 6months old and I'm dealing with the same stuff. Except I'm winning. All my snails are good at is creating piles of crap in the wake of their movements. I got a libman hand brush (kitchen isle) of the store and scrubbed my walls down while running mechanical/carbon to pick up the crap I scrubbed off. Did a 35% water change, running phos-zorb and all is well. I've been changing water every week since I'm not running a skimmer, but I do run Purigen by Seachem, which picks up disolved and undisolved organics. Just stick with it. Hope this helps a little.

[Acoustic]

1) Once you start the spending spiral begins. After you invest so much money you just can't justify not buying something you think you need. $800.00 later you still own a 7 gallon glass cube full of sand, dirt, and smelly things.

 

2) Everyone calls you a REEFTARD.

 

3) You really become a reeftard and slum around forums all day and get ####ed off because someone you don't know, that you'll probably never meet, types something stupid.

[fawkes027]

Installing the phosphate sponge I'm assuming will lessen future growth. But what do I do with all the algae covering my live rocks. Scrub it off or hope that my snails will get hungry?

[caja]

Pull out each rock and scrub it in a bucket of saltwater using a soft toothbrush. The phosphate sponge will defiinately help.

[Crakeur]

Fawkes, Ross and I had similar algae outbreaks that resulted in two scrapped tanks. Cajastan broke down a tank yesterday out of frustration.

 

That said, algae can be eliminated with patience. Major amounts of patience. The three of us clearly didn't have enough.

 

Let's start with the source of the algae. Test your phosphates, as mentioned. If they are high, get a phosphate remover. My choice is rowaphos. Clean, neat and very effective.

 

Second. Lighting. Reduce your photoperiod dramatically. If the tank is in a window, make sure no sunlight hits the tank. This was my problem (and cajastans too). I had moved my tank into a different room and the sunlight was no longer being reflected onto the tank via a mirrored building across the street. It was now more direct and the algae took off. It didn't help that I had a single stalk of bryopsis that I thought looked nice. My mistake.

 

Third. Algae removal. Take out the rocks that have the nuisance algae and scrub them with a toothbrush in a bucket of tank water. Dump the tank water and put the rock back in the tank. I was pulling about a cup of algae out a week. Sometimes more. My issue was hair algae first and then the bryopsis took over and it was near impossible to remove all of it. Thus the breakdown.

 

Four. Critters. Once the algae is reduced, your clean up crew can more effectively control the growth. Many people will tell you how useless their clean up crew is. I think the reason for this is simply, the algae is too thick or too long for the critters to eat it. Once trimmed, it is more manageable. Turbo snails are hands down the best at chowing on hair algae. The downside is that they are large and they are clumsy. They will bulldoze around the tank, knocking things over, damaging corals etc. They also tend to fall down if the water parameters aren't to their liking. They cannot turn themselves over so you are forced to keep an eye on them. I have 4 in my 26 and while they managed to knock tons of things around, I have had a relatively clean tank. I also have stomatella snails (very decent eaters too), trochus, astreas, nassarrius and a few other snails. The turbos seem to be the most active.

 

Hermit crabs - useless in my opinion. I have some but I have yet to see them do anything of value.

 

Lettuce Nudibranch. Another extremely effective algae eater. These slugs actually remove the photosynthetic material from the algae, killing the algae. they store the photosynthetic material, turning themselves a nice green.

 

Sea Hares/ Sea Bunnies. Another slug. Much less attractive than the Lettice Nudibranch, these slugs can get very large and will also eat a ton of algae. If you have two, they will mate frequently. This produces a food source for the tank.

 

The downside to the slugs is that they are extremely delicate and they can (and usually do) find themselves stuck in the intake of a powerhead. This usually results in death and a dead slug can be very bad for the tank. The Sea Hares are a bit stronger and less susceptible to the powerhead death.

 

Don't give up. Your worse case scenario is you break down the tank and start over. Costly? Yes. But, as Ross will say, you'll be back and you'll spend more money replacing all the equipment you got rid of so breaking down and starting over is not the worst that could happen.

 

Unfortunately, your thread is a mix of comedy (funny stuff - true too) and your anguish. Feel free to pm me if you have questions and don't want to sift thru the comedy.

[fawkes027]

I'll get some sort of phosphate remover today. I know my phosphates are high.

 

I'll try and lightly scrub off the nuisance algae. Hopefully I won't damage the coralline I have USED to have underneath it.

 

I'll cut back on my lighting, however how long should I leave the light on for? I have some corals in the tank.

 

And while I am on the subject of snails, the ones I have leave piles of "snail doodoo" everywhere. Is there anything I can do to get rid of it? I'm a total perfectionist and this really adds to my frustration. They're not eating anything so how can they be doing it?

[Crakeur]

snail poop can be siphoned out when you do a waterchange.

 

how long do you keep the lights on now?

 

If your phosphates are high, getting the rowaphos (or other phos remover) in place might eliminate the need to reduce the photoperiod but by doing both you should speed up the process of algae death.

 

 

Don't worry about the corralline. anything under the algae might be dead and the stuff you scrub might get damaged but it shouldn't all die off. Besides, it will grow back and be visible once the nuisance algae is gone so be concerned with removing the nuisance now and deal with the potential lack of corralline later.

[jojopus]

1.) everything SW costs too much.

 

2.) everything SW costs too much.

 

3.) everything SW costs too much.

 

 

that about sums this hobby up........ I still love it though, but my wife doesnt 8)

[fawkes027]

Right now they're on for about 14 hours a day. I turn the light on when I get up and off when I go to bed.

 

I've tried siphoning off the debris and that seems like a pain. I end up siphoning up my sand as well. It's also really difficult to manuever my "siphon" around my rock structures.

 

Well I'll keep trying. If worse comes to worse, I'll start over again. The tank is only over a month old. I can still steal some LS atleast from the tank.

[Crakeur]

only a month old? did you finish the cycle before adding critters?

 

14 hours a day is a lot of light. try cutting back to 10 hours a day.

[fawkes027]

Yes the tank was cycled before I added the fish.

[crichard6069]

I'm along for the ride.. have the same trouble with snail poop, algae, and ich.

[HogWinslow]

LIsten to Crakeur. He speaks the truth.

 

When I started I had a algae problem that I soon resolved by reading this forum. I used a phosphate remover, cut the photo period and removed the fish. I had 2 Yellow Tailed Damsels in a ten gallon that was getting way over fed. Eight months later the tank is so stable I only do water changes to replenish the trace elements. I couldn't tell you that last time I tested the water. The snails are a good indicater of water quality. If they aren't on the glass eating and are just sitting on the sand I know something is wrong. I never ran a heater because we keep the house at 78°. I moved the tank to the bedroom and soon the snails didn't seem happy. Checked the temp and it was at 75°. Put a heater in and the snails were happy.

 

My best advice based on my experience is to remove the fish, cut the photo period, use R/O water and a phosphate remover pad. Don't give up. It'll only make you want a reef tank even worse.

 

HogWinslow

[fawkes027]

Thanks everyone!