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Still having nutrient issues!


heifinator

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Scorch thank you

 

its been a while since we had before and after tank fixes. I vote for direct and immediate restoration of the whole tank in one move. top to bottom and new water. I had a lot to say on the matter due to being busy at reef2reef fixing up algae tanks, the nanos have it easy.

the large tankers who can't fully access have it rough.

 

in my opinion even before pics here the tank should be cleaned top to bottom and made detritus free if it isn't already. take off any GFO or nutrient sequestration other than those blocks above, they're fine and good.

 

Take each rock out of the tank and work surgery using a knife to scrape off 100% of the target, working around sensitives and not scraping them-surgery on a towel on the counter.

 

apply peroxide as the rinse each time, this is no bandaid its specific algae rasping + algae killer

 

reassemble your entire reef with zero cloud sandbed if applic, live rock that has been rinsed in saltwater externally to clean out any detritus stores + target rasped with a knifetip to remove the anchors for all algae. scraped like a dentist

 

that's a renewed reef tank, charged and fresh ORP its a CPR refreshment move, not a harming move. I have done countless ones.

the peroxide doesn't touch nontargets in this way, and all your corals can handle exposure just fine I drain my whole reef for 25 minutes routinely and that's with brittle stars in tow x many

 

reassemble a perfectly skip cycled reef and guide the algae out that way, disband all gfo and other nutrient binders just my opinion on how I could collect after pics of your challenge. feed the tank a bunch of cyclopeeze and change the water a lot for three months sustained, even though you've never had to do that before and sustain it. continue three mos even when it seems fixed initially

 

then back to normal, you just hand guided an obligate hitchhiker out of your reef and any other method is not clenching the final win by 8 pm today. it was feeding, your coloration problem

 

it was forced hand guiding, regardless of what pics show as the offender

 

it was detritus removal, that which you are having to add GFO to offset, or quite the high fish bioload pending pics

 

if in three months your tank is not the best its ever been on that kind of feeding and water change regimen, GFO it up heh

 

regardless of what the full tank shot pic w show, that's certainly the fix.

 

Lastly, to make the case for the rip clean + skip cycle reset, there is no other ideal condition you could apply an alternate move to. There is no form of anti algae action that works better leaving a display tank invaded. Nearly all alternate actions to the above are what we should be doing to prevent algae, not remove it, and any form of action on a forced-clean tank is much more likely to work than having to both kill off the algae + prevent it

 

part of the hidden trick about forced manual removal is this is what the ocean does with parrotfish and turtles, and, algae are self-feeding masses

 

they catch and hold local wastes for breakdown, out of range of your gfo stripping it only catches what the algae does not upon breakdown of detritus within the tufts. attacking it directly is directly winning

B

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2 hours ago, CronicReefer said:

It is possible because you started with dry rock it is going to take longer for your tank to reach "maturity". I also would recommend you swapping out one marinepure plate with a sulfur doped plate that is 2.5" or thicker and start dosing Microbacter7. The sulfur provides a food source for dentrifying bacteria deep within the plate to reduce nitrates/phosphates extremely well. It takes about 1-2 months for the plate to become fully seeded with bacteria. I would slowly start to reduce your GFO till you no longer need it because the sulfur doped plates are extremely effective at removing phosphates. I stopped testing because unless I dose phosphates I never get anything but 0.00 on my Hannah checker. I would continue carbon dosing as that helps a lot with proper bacteria growth. I had algae issues on and off for the first year in my 75g but as it's matured and I've focused more on biological filtration rather than using chemical I've had incredible success compared to before.

 

I would LOVE to believe that it is simply tank maturity but I set this tank up in November of 2015 so it has been running about 2 years now. Nearly all of which I have had algae issues, I am just finally getting fed up with it and trying everything.

 

I have so much surface area in this tank I just really have a hard time believing that coupled with the carbon dosing isn't providing enough for bacteria growth. My concern is since the tank was seeded with bottled bacteria that maybe I don't have enough bio-diversity? Sadly that is also hard to believe because of all the livestock and coral frags I have added would bring the bacterial diversity to the system...


I fed the tank almost NOTHING at this point and still have significant hair and macro algae growth in the display (have some form of green wirey algae as well). The fish load is moderate at most and still I am getting no noticeable change with anything I do.

 

Feels like I am just not hitting what is causing the issue at all. The tank started BB but I added a 1" sandbed (clean dry sand - new) after the algae started thinking I needed the additional surface area for bacterial population.

 

Who knows, it is very discouraging because I have a crappy 40 breeder sitting in the next room that gets 1/10th the attention and its beautiful. I even thought "Hey, maybe im just messing with it to much" and didn't touch anything for a few months other than changing GFO, light feeding, WC, etc and my PO4 / NO3 skyrocketed...

 

Not sure if this matters at all but I stopped GFO for a few weeks a while back and my po4 went from detectable at around 0.04 to 0.25 in 3 days. Still trying to figure that one out.

 

Total mystery with this system. I'm to the point that I think I will just restart the system, a lot less headache then figuring this out and it will tell me a lot if it just comes back with new rock, sand, and a fully cleaned out system...

 

Thanksf or the help!

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