Advice needed for algae and stocking on my 30 gallon tank.

Leon Gorani

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I have a 29 gallon tank and I have been having a lot of algae and phosphate problems. Last time I tested my phosphates were at .85 ppm, and my nitrates were at 15 ppm. I have a good amount of corals and they are doing pretty good but I feel like they are not opening or growing as they should for some reason. I just started dosing hydrogen peroxide to help with the algae problem, it helped before when I did a blackout a few months ago but the algae is coming back. I just feel like I am struggling to keep it away and keeping my parameters consistent. Im not sure if I cycled my tank wrong or something in the beginning which lead to these problems. The tank is almost 9 months old now. For stocking I have 2 clownfish, 2 filefish, 1 tailspot blenny, and a yellow wrasse.
I have a medium cpr aquatics hang on the back refugium and a aquamax protein skimmer for my filtration, no sumo on my tank.
many advice on what I can do to keep the phosphates down and how to keep algae away? My phosphates were at .30 about a month ago but lately they spiked.

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Picasso the Triggerfish

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I suggest adding banded trochus snails or Blue Tuxedo Urchins for algae (BTU only if your tank is 50 gallon or more), they are "algae black holes", specially the BTU, also, the BTS breeds like rabbits, so you will have a lot of them if you add more than ~5.
 

nereefpat

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You are going to have to drop those phosphate values, or you will always have to deal with algae problems.

Do you have a way to run GFO?
 

R.Weller

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There are a few common places for phosphates: food, rock & top-off water. Did you start with dry rock (this will leach phosphates over time)? Are you using RO for top-off / water changes? As for food, what, how much & how often are you feeding?
 
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Leon Gorani

Leon Gorani

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You are going to have to drop those phosphate values, or you will always have to deal with algae problems.

Do you have a way to run GFO?
Gotcha, besides running bags of some type of gfo in my refugium no, I would have to find some kind of reactor or something that would help I guess? I don’t know what there is for sumpless tanks. I have one bag of phosguard in the fuge now but I might have to add a few more to really get it to work, you think? Maybe 2 or 3 bags of it?
 
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Leon Gorani

Leon Gorani

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There are a few common places for phosphates: food, rock & top-off water. Did you start with dry rock (this will leach phosphates over time)? Are you using RO for top-off / water changes? As for food, what, how much & how often are you feeding?
Yes I started the tank with all dry rock, rodi water and have been using rodi the entire time. I need to do more frequent water changes maybe? I am feeding less often, every other day.
 

NS Mike D

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You can fix this in one day with a rip clean. Basically you do a 100% water change, pull teh rock and scrub the algae off and kill what's left with a spray of hydrogen peroxide and then rinse in rodi, and you rinse clean you sand. That gets the algae out of the tank and starts you with clean rock, sand and water and your will be fine (there are some exceptions.

Your bacteria film and coraline will survive

I have a 29gal tank with the larger CPR HOB. (I did add a DIY sump later)


@brandon429 has thread on this and walks members through the process and has many documented successes.


then you'll need to keep an eye on those NO3 and PO4 numbers. fiwwi. cheap strip reef LED lights on top of the CPR grow cheato like mad. back before I overdid my tank that fuge kept my numbers very low, the CPR was wall to wall cheato and I'd pull a decent mat out every two weeks.
 
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NS Mike D

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Official Sand Rinse Thread

 

nereefpat

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Gotcha, besides running bags of some type of gfo in my refugium no, I would have to find some kind of reactor or something that would help I guess?

Yes, it works mu h better if you can push the water through the GFO/phosguard.

Water changes actually don't work very well for dropping phosphate. The P binds and is released by rock and sand.
 

R.Weller

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Yes I started the tank with all dry rock, rodi water and have been using rodi the entire time. I need to do more frequent water changes maybe? I am feeding less often, every other day.

It can take awhile for phosphates to come out of dry rock...like 6 - 12 months or more. Are you able to grow macroalgae (e.g. chaeto) in your refug? If you are sure it's not present in your RODI water (never hurts to test it), then it's probably coming from the rock but I would not have expected to see a spike unless it was around your water change cycle. What CUC do you have in the tank?
 
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Leon Gorani

Leon Gorani

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You can fix this in one day with a rip clean. Basically you do a 100% water change, pull teh rock and scrub the algae off and kill what's left with a spray of hydrogen peroxide and then rinse in rodi, and you rinse clean you sand. That gets the algae out of the tank and starts you with clean rock, sand and water and your will be fine (there are some exceptions.

Your bacteria film and coraline will survive

I have a 29gal tank with the larger CPR HOB. (I did add a DIY sump later)


@brandon429 has thread on this and walks members through the process and has many documented successes.


then you'll need to keep an eye on those NO3 and PO4 numbers. fiwwi. cheap strip reef LED lights on top of the CPR grow cheato like mad. back before I overdid my tank that fuge kept my numbers very low, the CPR was wall to wall cheato and I'd pull a decent mat out every two weeks.
Yeah I guess I could do that but the thing is all of my rock is epoxied together, so I’d have to break apart my rock structure to get it out, plus I have some anemones stretched to that rock.
Do you guys think it would be a good idea to just completely change my rocks entirely with new live rocks? Would that get rid of the algae/phosphate problem? If not I could wait it out for a few more months until I reach a year, like R. Weller said up there? Would the phosphates decrease over a long span of time like that?
 

NS Mike D

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Yeah I guess I could do that but the thing is all of my rock is epoxied together, so I’d have to break apart my rock structure to get it out, plus I have some anemones stretched to that rock.
Do you guys think it would be a good idea to just completely change my rocks entirely with new live rocks? Would that get rid of the algae/phosphate problem? If not I could wait it out for a few more months until I reach a year, like R. Weller said up there? Would the phosphates decrease over a long span of time like that?


@brandon429 has a ton of experience and should be able to answer your questions.
 

brandon429

why did you put a reef in that
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I’ve watched all of Leon’s posts about algae for months, the direction the masses have lead: nutrients, nutrients, nutrients, testing, wait, test, buy offsets, wait and we are still here. They’ll advise to just wait longer. We would have had your tank filled with corals by now with no algae using a fully different method.

all the help offered posts involve things you can do through the water to help, that’s not helping, time to reverse course if you are ready.

you have a nano reef which gives you an inside angle to never ever having a sustained algae challenge: complete accessibility. All the fix advice you’ve been given is for 400 gallon reefs which must use water-only access for sheer practicality.

@Daniel266jz this is an important progression thread to reference in steering your maturing new reef. Hands on vs hands off
see the post history for this tank not to focus on expected new tank challenges, some are coming your way too, but to see what the masses have always been advising on each thread started.

advisors are by and large still against direct intervention as a pattern, they won’t do it, always a reason why we have to wait till later to enjoy our investments. Treat nano reef invasions oppositely from large tank invasions to save $


Leon
If you want to finally get off the stress mode, test our method for two weeks and we can track pics. Spray your anemones with saltwater when working emersed, get creative. They don’t have to be drying out, they’ll be ok several mins out of water if you wet them with saltwater while working

nitrate and phosphate has nothing to do with your issue those params are for coral tuning, stop testing for them and dose nothing that offsets nitrate and phosphate. What we do is opposite of the masses, with an opposite turnaround timeframe.


drain your water, kill the algae directly, remove the dead growths vs let them rot in the tank (current advice) and put the water back. Make mostly new water for the return setup



Dinos would be far worse, we stop po4 detailing to save you from that event. What you have is easy to kill off, it’s part of expected growths for tanks that don’t begin with all real coralline live rock, this is just catch up here vs preemptive work directly on rocks.

if your system was filled with eight years of deep sand with dark black and green patches, with accumulations in all the tank corners, I’d think you have a phosphate and nitrate issue, you don’t. by selecting to start with rock that takes a while to leach phosphate, vs all coralline live rock that doesn’t, you + increase the physical access work for your reef it’s not about offsetting that inevitable phosphate.

when you want this tank free of algae you can have it in a few hours, how ready r u


do take time to study all posts associated with this ongoing challenge, my advice couldn’t possibly be more opposite therefore we can expect fully opposite looking after pics without delay.

the right way to fix this is removing rocks for external work.


the secondary option is draining the water and working on the rock as it sits in the tank, same action on the rocks either way.
 
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tanked4u

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Weekly 15% water changes and adding a tuxedo urchin to my CUC took care of the algae situation in my 32 gallon.

I am also a big astrea snail fan if you do not have a couple in your CUC.
 

brandon429

why did you put a reef in that
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You should never change rocks, the total benefit is having then beating this challenge by using known working methods vs guessing ones


The only reason you’ve had trouble here is your algae advisors from prior threads leading up to this one are recommending steps that helped their tank at home...the steps that work in tanks outside the advisors homes are different.

knowing that the secret of nano reef keeping is making use of your easy, simple direct access will turn your reefing around permanently. Stop hesitating even one second longer...to ID your invader is hesitating. To dose something and wait is to hesitate


grab 30 gallons of saltwater let’s unhesitate

all of my advice comes from not this thread



by clicking and reading the history of this tank from last year-> today a path becomes clear
 
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R.Weller

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This post started with recommendations on how to keep phosphates in check. I expect that knowing the source is likely the dry rock itself will be beneficial whatever the remediation strategy. Provided there are no other source(s), 'growing it out' will work...it just takes time & the tank will look ugly during this time. Significant water changes will help as you will export that which has already leached out & the source is finite (i.e. it's on the exposes surfaces inside the rock). I cannot speak to pulling rock out of water & scrapping it. I have seen others recommend that approach likely based on their successful experiences.

Perhaps allowing it to starve itself out is easier on larger systems b/c they tend to have less spatial limitations. We can build a dedicated space for a 30" turf scrubber & target light with a cheap plant grow bulb to encourage algae where we want it. I appreciate that smaller systems do not have that luxury. A decent CUC is also important & as noted above, it's not clear what CUC are present in the system already.
 
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