Algae Help

[AdamC00]

I have a 170 Gallon Display that has been running since September. I have a horrible algae problem and am having a really hard time fighting it. My phosphates test at 0 and so do my nitrates. I am sure the phosphate is a false reading. I have a decent CUC in there along with 2 golbys. I am running a carbon and GFO reactor. I have dosed Chemi-clean and vodka. I have done a 3 day lights out. Nothing seems to fix the problem. I am being impatient or is there something else I should be doing.





Thanks for your help!

Adam

 

[jsker]

Yes you have Green Hair algae, What test kit are you using? This is my story I did not want to nuke my tank with the Chemi-clean, I wanted to find out what I was doing wrong. My phosphates are now at .04ppm red sea and my nitrates are still through the roof and 7+ppm on the low side of the red sea test. I was back at 16 ppm Po4 and really never really have know or cared were my No3 were at, just know they were high and had to get them down:) I would like to get the Po4's down to the least point of .02 ppm and the No3's down to .04 ppm and I will be happy. You can run some kind of carbon, I am running biopettlets in a small reactor and GFO and my GHA is almost gone. I am now dealing with red slim and I am going to change my RO/DI filters tomorrow and this should resolve my issue in another two weeks.

Look back at what change you have made in the past 3 months and that will be your answer. I have tried the quick fixes, and that is what they are, quick fixes:rolleyes:

 

[AdamC00]

I am using Hanna for phosphates and Salifert for N03. I am running carbon and GFO in reactors. There have been no real changes in the last 3 months. There were some fish added and the reactors added. Nothing else has changed. I dosed Chemi-clean 3 days ago and have not noticed a difference yet.

 

[jsker]

I am using Hanna for phosphates and Salifert for N03. I am running carbon and GFO in reactors. There have been no real changes in the last 3 months. There were some fish added and the reactors added. Nothing else has changed. I dosed Chemi-clean 3 days ago and have not noticed a difference yet.

Lighting?

 

[AdamC00]

Lighting has not changed. Running (2) 250 MH with 4 T-5's MH's run for 8 hours a day and T5's run for 9 hours a day.

 

[Catchemall]

Id make it grow elsewhere in a controlled environment such as an algae turf scrubber so it will outcompete nutrients within the display tank.

 

[kateater]

What type of live rock do you have? I ran into a similar situation with my 215 using 200lbs of dry Marco rock that was cured for 2 months. This was back in 2009 so there wasn't many affordable digital testers. But all my test came back zero.

 

[AdamC00]

I am running a refugium with live rock and cheato. It is growing like crazy in there. The live rock was all established live rock when I added it to the tank. None of it was ever dry. I have about 150 pounds of it.

 

[kateater]

You could always manually remove it with a toothbrush until you figure out what's causing it.

 

[AdamC00]

Id make it grow elsewhere in a controlled environment such as an algae turf scrubber so it will outcompete nutrients within the display tank.

I have thought about this but do not know much about it. Also dont know where to put it. I am limited in space under my tank and sump

 

[Catchemall]

https://www.algaescrubbing.com

http://algaescrubber.net/forums/forum.php

Here some good websites on algae scrubbers check it out

 

[AdamC00]

Other people think this may be Dinos. I have been manually removing daily and it comes back the next day. Do you think an ATS would help against Dinos? I know it will not eliminate them, but if it would keep them in check, I would be a lot happier than I am now.

 

[Catchemall]

Other people think this may be Dinos. I have been manually removing daily and it comes back the next day. Do you think an ATS would help against Dinos? I know it will not eliminate them, but if it would keep them in check, I would be a lot happier than I am now.

I'm certainly still a rookie at this algae scrubber stuff. but from what I've read and believe, it will eventually if all criteria is met and its built strong enough, it will eventually outcompete the Dino's and use all available nutrients. Once the screen is established and matured.

12sq inch of screen per cube of food
Lights on both sides preferably grow lights. Opposite of main display lights.
35gph of water flow per inch of screen width

Hopefully @Floyd R Turbo will chime in and give his knowledge he's really cool about helping out with this stiff

 

[Turbo's Aquatics]

Other people think this may be Dinos.

If they are dinos, you should be able to completely remove them using an airline tubing siphon, which is a section of hard airline tubing like what is used in an undergravel filter in the towers, connected to soft tubing. You should be able to siphon nearly 100% of them out and only take out a gallon or two of water (in like 30 minutes, it takes time!)

If you can't siphon them off like that then it's not dinos, it's hair algae (which attaches firmly)

Dinos usually pop up when you make major changes to flow or rock structure and usually they will burn themselves out after a few weeks as long as you try to mitigate their growth. It's my opinion that there is no one solution to getting rid of them, you just do it all and manually remove and let them run their course. This is why you hear "XYZ worked for me in 2 weeks" when all they really did was mitigate and time took over...JMO like I said...

You could always manually remove it with a toothbrush

Scrubbing the rocks off is one way to temporarily remove the algae, but it also can remove the periphyton which is where a lot of the bacteria live, so you in essence "reset" that and then your tank (rocks) might go through some mini cycling as these bacteria re-establish (not a nitrogen cycle, a bacterial growth/death cycle, which is more invisible to our test kits)

If you were to put an Algae Scrubber on the tank, it's going to have to compete with the tank algae, which is in effect, an algae scrubber. So you may have to do the manual removal thing to some extent just to get the scrubber ramped up and growing. But maybe not - every tank is different. So a scrubber may work here, but it's going to take time because you've got something else going on here that it's going to have to compete with or battle against - there is a nutrient source in the rock.

the source though is the thing to focus on. Since it's on all your rocks, it could be that your rocks have become saturated over time due to high N and P conditons, and now that they can't act as a nutrient sink anymore, the algae grows. If that's the case, chances are if you got super aggressive with N and P removal, the algae would continue to grow for a while (months). There are a couple ways to fix this potentially. The last-resort is to nuke the rock with a Muriatic acid bath, which kills everything and dissolves off any calcium-bound phosphate (along with the rock itself). Another is to cook the rock like it was new, and be aggressive on skimming and GFO in the curing tub and let bacteria do the work; this takes longer but your rock won't have to cycle again.

I would also consider your light schedule, I'm not the expert but 8 hours of MH to me seems a bit much. I might go to 6 hours of MH peak.