Thanks for the advice .I have had my tank from little over a year . What would you consider excessive feeding for a 50 gallon ( not including sump) 2 clowns 1 wrasse and a blue tang . I feed a pinch of dry food (nyos) every other day and once a week a mix of frozen w/ pinch of reefroid)
the amount of dry food sounds fine. How much of the frozen is fed per week? Also how much corals do you have and how much cuc/filter feeders do you have. I think we will have to look at your biomass in aggregate to see if you are feeding too much. remember that fish pee/poop is actually coral food too so if you don't have a lot of corals yet, the frozen/roid may not be necessary.
Thanks for the additional info - i have a few thoughts to these:
www.reef2reef.com
www.reef2reef.com
thank you sooo much ! Im going to go the natural way .. feel less risk to fish and coral . By flosser you mean skimmer correct ? .. I have no problem turning these off. For bio diversity what do you have in mind ?Thanks for the additional info - i have a few thoughts to these:
TLDR version: seems to me your GHA issue is only partially related to current feeding, and partially accumulated waste in sand/rock pores. For the current feeding portion - i would reduce the portion of the weekly frozen + reefroid. it doesn't look like you have a lot of corals, so the fish poop/pee should be enough to keep your corals fed (esp from your tang and wrasse). For the accumulated waste - despite it looks like your system has very beefy and advanced filtration system, there are limits to what it filters out (see the long version explanation below) and it's this limitation that's resulting in waste accumulating in sand/rocks. Based on how you described your sand husbandry, i would actually recommend a rip clean soon. I've never done a rip clean myself but @brandon429 is our resident expert on this so please check out his posts on this matter. Basically, unlike the tradition view of "live sand" acting like a biological compost bin that processes waste, due to all the fancy outside filtration we now have installed in the tank, most tank's sand bed is actually acting like a diaper, and your tanks diaper is very full right now. here's the official thread on this. Once you get your current issue stabilized, i have two recommendations on how to move forward (see the long version explanation below)
Official Sand Rinse and Tank Transfer thread
If you are reading this thread to cure a tank invasion from a link I sent you, we do not need to identify your type of invasion here we do not need you to test anything at anytime regarding nitrate, phosphate etc Above all, we do not need to see a microscope slide picture of your invasion at...
@brandon429 - please see OP's problem above, would you agree a rip clean is in order?
Long explanation version:
In case you are unfamiliar, when we talk about "excess nutrient" it's not just the final No3/Po4 reading but its actually everything in this complex nutrient cycle from the moment you put food into the tank to ultimately the absorption/removal of NO3/po4 at the end. Simplistically you can think if it as happening in 3 stages - 1) the solid food you put into the tank, absorbed by fish and corals. 2) dissolved organics from fish/coral waste, uneaten food that broken down by other processes. and 3) finally these further break down by additional processes into NO3/Po4.
Your GHA issue is a result of how your current filtration interacts with this complex web of cause and effects that created an environment where your GHA does not have any direct nutrient competition to keep it in line. To explain:
1) your floss/sock takes out the uneaten food from stage 1)
2) your skimmer takes out the unabsorbed nutrient from stage 2)
3) despite having these fancy filtrations, total filtration from these two thing is not close to 100% - think about it this way - it's not like all of your unabsorbed nutrient from stage 1 and 2 all line up neatly to go into your overflow, into your sump, into the skimmer/flosser, and get caught up in it. At any time in your tank, only a portion of the waste from the DT goes into the sump, a portion of that flows into your flosser/sump, and a "cleaner" water is pumped back into the DT, which now has a lower concentration of waste, so even less % of the waste goes back into the sump. As this is happening and additional waste is produced, a natural balance is reached where a fixed % of nutrient/waste always remain in the water. This % is either processed by bacteria immediately into NO3/Po4 that the GHA consumes. or settle down in your rock pore/sand to be processed by bacteria later and release NO3/Po4 into the water later.
4) nothing in your current filtration directly absorbs No3/po4. The other primary absorbers of No3/Po4 is bacteria, but your system actively sterilizes this population by your UV. this is why GHA is a problem - there is nothing that competes with the absorption of this stage 3 nutrient against GHA.
This is why i suggested rip cleaning - to clean the waste that's settled into your sand. do not try to stir up your sand now b/c there will be trapped waste/toxins in those sand layers that if not properly handled, could crash your tank. instead please follow brandon's rip clean method. This, plus reduced feeding, will reduce the source that's fueling the the stage 3 nutrient. Couple that with manual removal of gha and you should see the stage 3 nutrient reduce and GHA reduce gradually.
As for direct no3/po4 absorption to help filter the "stage 3" nutrient to control GHA, you will need to set up a fuge or algae scrubber.
Once you tackle this current issue, there are two separate paths to move forward to prevent this problem from coming back:
the natural way:
1) introduce more biodiversity to control the excess nutrient from all three stages. Because currently you are relying on external controls for this, your microfauna has no chance to establish in your tank to act as biological control - this is why you have no worms, very little filter feeders, etc.. The food chain for this microsystem starts with bacteria (which your UV eliminates), that feed planktons (which is further starved by your flosser/skimmer), that feeds the filter feeders and worms (which is also starved by your flosser). The worm in turn also turns over your sandbed, preventing toxic buildup and turning it into a true waste compost. (stirring the sandbed periodically help too - but the requisit here is you have to start with a clean sandbed that doesn't already have toxic buildup).
2) Pros: will result in a much more stable and naturally mature tank
3) Con: will take very long and a lot of hard work to achieve, need to remove at least the flosser and UV - will go thru many more "ugly phases" as the different organism establish themselves to get to balance.
the rip clean way:
1) keep your current set up but will need to understand that your tank is on a diaper that needs to be changed out periodically.
2) pro: keep your current set up the same - less change, less work,
3) con: you'll have the same underlying problem that I described - so will need to repeat rip clean periodically to maintain.
NP - by flosser i mean your polyfilter. Can keep skimmer online, esp since you have no fuge. we'd want to do things slowly. Taking everything offline all at once is not good for your tank stability either.
