restocking crashed tank

[prettyflywhiteguy]

My tank crashed and everything in it died a month ago, i took the corpses out and kept up the photoperiod out of habit.

 

I was just out of town for a week and my friend who came over to feed my FW tank left the light on my nano on for the whole time i was gone.. i came home to find a tank literally full of algae, there was like an inch and a half of water column underneath this huge mass of hair algae thatenveloped everything. needless to say i took a dozen or so fistfulls of it out and there's still a ton of it in there, but now there's also a water column...

 

my real question is this, is it safe to start adding inverts again a month after a crash with 2 weeks stable, good water parms , and the potential to grow a pound of algae in a week?

[EtOH_is_good]

imo, clean out all the algae that you can before even thinking of adding clean up crew. are you using clean (ro/di) water for your tank? need to clean out all the phosphates and nitrates before new life should be added. even going without a photoperiod for several weeks may eventually help. but keep up with the water changes.

[nalbar]

read myth #15 in this article;

 

http://reefkeeping.com/issues/2004-01/eb/index.htm

 

 

you have a rare chance. if i was you i would let it go and see what happens.

 

 

 

nalbar

[prettyflywhiteguy]

i just got a test kit and yeah the phosphate in my water is through the roof, I've just been using water that I've put through the same prefilter that i use for my FW tanks, i was told by someone locally that it worked, my tank is the evidence otherwise.

 

my other thought was to keep a ton of macroalgae in my sump to compete with the algaes in the tank for phosphates and nutrients. I can't find anyplace that sells RO near my university. so that's definitely out, and before you tell me to just go to a grocery store, we don't have one here, 6 bodegas where anyone with 15 bucks can get good pure weed, but pure water is out of the question

 

nalbar- i read the article and I'm not 100% sure how i have a rare oportunity, it's just a huge hair algae bloom, could you dumb your point down to me because I'm not sure what you're getting at.

[newbiecarlz]

hey if you live near the uni wouldnt you be able to talk to someone about getting distilled water from the science labs? at my uni they have distilled on tap.. (and natural sw on tap too - if you know where to look!)

[prettyflywhiteguy]

now that's an idea, I'll talk to a few professors about stealing a few gallons a week, thanks bro

[prettyflywhiteguy]

nothing good came of swindling distilled water from the labs, but a local retailer who's sympathetic to my plight is giving me a deal on a used RO unit, so i will have RO water, and he's a good guy, giving me a deal on my first canisters too