Algae/Dino

Calireefer92 · Oct 29, 2023

Hello everyone I’m struggling for the life of me on how to get rid of algae or Dino. I’ve tried tank black out for a week, I’ve tried uv sterilizer, Chemiclean manually removing it. Would really appreciate help on this also use rodi system with zero tds nitrate 16ppm phosphate 0.3

slingfox · Oct 29, 2023

My rockwork looked even worse a few days ago when dinos went wild after I took out all my rockwork to soak it in hydrogen peroxide to deal with an ulva and GHA infestation.

I have started to bring dinos under control via a combination of daily manual scrubbing, UV running 24/7 (I accidentally left it off for several weeks), dosing to get my phosphate and nitrates above zero, and dosing Waste Away and Macrobacter7 on alternating days. Every day the dinos have come back but less (I am 3 days into the process). When I do the daily clear of dinos my tank gets full of detritus. During the daily cleanup, I try to capture as many dinos as possible. I do this by runnjng a Marineland Polisher in the display tank, ReefMat in the sump, and a manifold which recirculates water into a 10 micron filter. After 30 minutes to an hour, the filter sock turns brown since dinos are small and can pass straight through the 200 micron Reefmat.

For the manual scrubbing I use a Rubbermaid Reveal Cordless Battery Power Scrubber. That makes the scrubbing job much easier. After I scrub down the rocks I use a spare power head to blow off the rockwork and get as many dinos suspended into the water column as possible so they can be filtered out or killed by the UV sterilizer.

My rocks are looking good and the sandbed is improving but will likely take some time. I recently ordered some silicate so I may start dosing that in hopes that diatoms can compete against the dinos on the sand bed.