I’m just lost for words at this point. Gha has won the war and I’m breaking down my reefer 450 only after 10 months I’m beyond devastated. Let me tell you how I failed. Tank went wet last March and I slowly added fish the next month or 2 as they passed qt they were introduced. Everything was good for a couple more months until I started adding sps and some acropora, I now know way too soon for sps, and noticed they didn’t like my clean water. Mind you I had the bottom sump turned into a chaeto department with some miracle mud running reverse cycle. Chaeto never really grew only some brown hair algae and every 3 weeks or so I would take my turbo snails from my dt and put them in the sump to clean the algae and then after a few days back in my dt.
That was going on for a couple months until I decided I needed to up my nutrients to help my sps. Started dosing me coral nitrate got my n03 up to 5 ppm and stable and didn’t need to dose n03 to keep it up anymore. Had to dose a good amount of p04 to keep it detectable in my Hanna ulr Meter. Mind you I had zero algae growing in my dt. So I realized it was counter productive to grow chaeto and dose nutrients. So I removed the chaeto, miracle mud, algae baffle in my sump and was just running skimmer (I never run carbon or only once and while temporarily). Got sick
Of daily dosing p04 so I made my own solution with TSP and added that to ato water and that was perfect for me. Solid stable p04 of .02-.04 and n03 was always 3-5ppm and my acropora we’re looking unbelievable. So that was going on for a few months and then late November I started seeing small patches of brown and green hair algae randomly and would pick it out here and there not really thinking about it. My hippo and yellow tang doesn’t touch the stuff neither does my lawn mower blenny. Then beginning of December it started to get bad so I stopped p04 dosing and just let the tank do it’s thing with daily feeding of the fish and some acropower etc to get my levels down to try and starve out the algae. No noticbale change in algae from stopping dosing and my acros we’re starting to lose color. I bought more cuc they made no Change. I tried nopox for a couple weeks drove my n03 to 0 and got a nasty outbreak of cyano from it. Stopped the nopox and have stable n03 of about 1-2ppm now with no nopox and only a touch of cyano here and there now. I then used gfo for a week and stripped the p04 and acros immediately got white tips and some base recession so I said screw it im gonna go back to p04 dosing and stop the gfo cause the algae is growing no matter what the levels are and my acros only look good and won’t rtn if I dose p04 daily. But now I’m in a daily battle of hand scrubbing the rocks in the tank and honestly not making much of a difference.
I have bought probably $400 worth of additional cuc over the past 2 months and they didn’t do anything even Sea hares! I tried fluconozole but it only killed my bryopsis. installed a cw-100 ats 2 weeks ago and I have some nice hair algae growing on that already but it’s not stopping the algae in my dt. I’ve literally lost sleep over this and I’m at the point where I’m gonna break down the tank, remove the sand, soak all the rock in h202 and rebuilt and re start and pray that it doesn’t happen again. How would you guys prevent gha from taking over the tank while maintaining p04 and n03? My nuvo 10 and jbj 20 are going along great with the same nutrient levels and 0 algae.
Going forward I will use ats from the start to give the algae a place to grow outside my dt. Don’t add sps for atleast a year. And pray it doesn’t come back. How sad.
