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HELP -- my tank is so ugly


LucyLucy

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teenyreef

I think you're on the right track with replacing the gravel with sand and adding a power head. If it was me, I wouldn't spend money replacing the light at this time, I'd wait until I saw what results come from the first steps. Do you have many algae eaters in your clean up crew? Not all types of snails do much for algae, so you may want another snail or two that likes algae, or maybe a hermit crab or emerald crab.

 

But honestly, since you've had this tank running without this kind of problem before, I wouldn't blame the equipment that was working fine already. From your posts, I think the main things you've changed is putting in the gravel and that there's been some lack of maintenance. Either or both of those things alone could explain what you're seeing now.

 

Your nitrates and phosphates are at zero which is not desired. In most cases, that really means that your tank has an excess of nitrates and phosphates, which is making lots of algae grow, which then sucks up that excess as fast as it is produced, resulting in zeros. But you already know you have too much algae 🙂

 

Keep up with regular large water changes, maybe 25% every week. While you have the old water in a bucket, pull out the rocks and put them in the bucket one at a time. Remove the undesirable algae manually so your clean up crew will eat it, and gently scrub off the rocks with a brush to clean off some of the bacterial film. Rinse them well in the old water, then put them back in the tank and pour in new water. 

 

The only other parameter that looks off to me is your alkalinity. Test strips are notorious for going bad quickly, and that kit reads in ppm Kh instead of dKh, so you have to convert. I think 80 ppm Kh converts to about 4.5 or 5 kKh which would be crazy low if correct. But you don't have any large sps that would cause your alk to go that low, so I'm inclined to think that's just an expired or inaccurate test. There's nothing in your tank that should be consuming alk so I wouldn't worry about that parameter for now, since your regular water changes should replenish alkalinity to normal levels.

 

Your return pump seems fine to me. Just clean it ever few months so that the flow doesn't get too slow.

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Your tank isn't really in a bad situation. Just needs some tlc.

 

Changing gravel is a good idea.

 

Getting back to regular waterchanges will help.

 

Adding some snails will help with the small patches of algae. You can scrub it off and siphon the stuff out during waterchanges. Or use tweezers to reduce it.

 

Placing your snails directly on the algae really helps.

 

Using a Turkey baster on the rocks during waterchanges helps remove detritus.

 

Your pump is fine. It's the upgraded pump from IM.

 

Adding flow will be beneficial though. You can do 2 things.

 

Add RFG nozzles to your return- these really add a nice random flow and the flow continuously changes with these or add a wavemaker.

 

 

Nitrates and phos at 0 are definitely not beneficial.

 

Alk is low but you don't have corals so that's not a major concern for now.

 

I would wait to upgrade the light until you want corals. What you have is fine for what's currently in the tank.

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7 hours ago, teenyreef said:

Do you have many algae eaters in your clean up crew? Not all types of snails do much for algae, so you may want another snail or two that likes algae, or maybe a hermit crab or emerald crab.

Yeah I have no cleanup crew basically, just one hermit that's the size of a penny. I'm not sure where to get cleanup crew though since basically all small businesses in Los Angeles area are closed right now. 

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51 minutes ago, LucyLucy said:

Yeah I have no cleanup crew basically, just one hermit that's the size of a penny. I'm not sure where to get cleanup crew though since basically all small businesses in Los Angeles area are closed right now. 

There are places still shipping, you could order some trochus, nassaurius, and cerith.

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teenyreef

 

1 hour ago, Clown79 said:

There are places still shipping, you could order some trochus, nassaurius, and cerith.

Those would be great. I like astreas too. Reefcleaners is a popular sponsor here on N-R that ships free and is very reasonably priced. They now offer "rimless" clean up crew packages which is good, because their regular packages come with nerites that tend to go exploring right over the edge of the tank. They also offer packages with and without hermits and emerald crabs.

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Alright everyone, here is an update after my deep clean yesterday. It took me a few hours but I did a complete cleaning of the "sump" in the back (vacuumed all the detritus out, replaced the carbon, took apart the pump and deep cleaned it), I took out the rocks and absolutely scrubbed the best that I could, cleaned the class, and finally I vacuumed every part of the gravel bed. The pump is so much more powerful now that I've cleaned out the gunk. The new sand should be here in a few days and I'm going to order some clean up crew from reef cleaners and one of the wave makers suggested in this thread.

 

Here are some photos of what the tank looks like now. I know the underlying problems still are not completely sorted out, but It looks 1000 times better than before in my opinion.  Fynn and Gilly are really huge attention seekers and wouldn't get out of the way for the photos 😂 , but here is what it looks like now. If you want, I'll update in a few weeks once everything is fully together.

 

I also wanted to say thank you to everyone for the great information and help with my little tank. You guys have really inspired me to get back into it all and I might even try some easy corals again in a couple of months. 

 

 

 

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