High phosphate

[picklerick47]

Hello everyone. So I’ve had my tank running now for close to three months. A few weeks back I noticed that I started getting a brown algae growing heavily on my sand bed and rocks. I decided to do a 50% water change, suck up all the algae and cut the lights for 3 days. When the lights came back on almost all the algae was gone. Fast forward to a few days ago and I noticed the algae was returning but even worse this time. I decided to get a Hanna test kit and get a more accurate test reading. For my nitrate I’m sitting at 14 and for my phosphate I’m at .70!!! I know it’s way too high and I’m trying to understand how it got to that point to begin with. I don’t feed my corals that much, maybe once every 2 weeks. I feed my fish 2-3 a day with pellet food and occasionally frozen mysis shrimp. I feel like I should cut back on the pellets and feed more frozen food. I guess my first question is, could the pellets be a correlation to high levels of phosphate? I’m assuming my high levels of phosphate are what’s causing this outbreak of algae? Lastly, what are some ways I can bring down my levels of phosphate? I’m currently not running any reactors or a protein skimmer.

Tank:
Water box 15g peninsula

Tank mates:
2 clowns
1 neon goby
1 tailspot blenny
7 snails
2 hermit crabs
2 sexy shrimp
1 cleaner shrimp

I’m welcome to any ideas.

 

[exnisstech]

Looks like a young tank. I have one tank that's been running over 8 years and and tests 15-20 nitrate and 0.4 - 0.6 regularly and the tank looks great so I don't consider 0.7 terrible but many people will disagree. I'm a fan of letting new tanks mature on their own and not fretting over the process. You might benifit from adding some bacteria like microbactor 7.