danieljones8623
Community Member
Hey everybody. Forgive me if this has already been discussed. I am interested in discussing a good rate to lower nutrient level in my FOWLR tank.
I believe I discussed this on a previous discussion, so I'll recap a bit to help bring folks up to speed. This tank has been set up for a year, actually a bit over a year now. At first, I had good success with the tank. Everything was progressing along nicely. My nutrient levels were consistently very low, and I took a good bit of pride in doing regular water changes. At some point however, I developed some nuisance algae, that I believe was very possibly dinoflagellates. I tried a lot of thing to fix it, but I believe the thing that finally help me with them was that I completely shut off my lights for a few months and kept the blinds around around the tank closed. Besides that, my home is mostly kind of dim because we lamps primarily for light. During this time, I have also done minimal water changes, and at some point, I cut my skimmer off for a while. So, fast forward to today, and I have been cutting aquarium light back on, and it appears that I don't have a dinoflagellates problem anymore, thank goodness. What I have now, though, is a bunch of unappealing looking brown algae that is has grown on rocks since I've had my lights back going. So, I've been recently starting to reduce the nutrient levels in the tank and clean the tank up, but not reduce the nutrients too low or too fast. The freshwater hobbyist said of me wants to do a couple of 50% water changes to get back on track, but I'm guessing that's probably a bad idea. My tank is a 40 gal. breeder with a 20 gal. sump that about how full, so I am guessing with rock and sand, I might have about 40 gal. of water. I did about a 10% change last night.
Would it be ok for me to do several 20-30% changes, with a day or two in between to speed up the process? If not, what would be a better schedule? I only have rocks, some sand, a few snails, fighting couch and two clown fish at the moment.
Thanks in advance for any advice.
I believe I discussed this on a previous discussion, so I'll recap a bit to help bring folks up to speed. This tank has been set up for a year, actually a bit over a year now. At first, I had good success with the tank. Everything was progressing along nicely. My nutrient levels were consistently very low, and I took a good bit of pride in doing regular water changes. At some point however, I developed some nuisance algae, that I believe was very possibly dinoflagellates. I tried a lot of thing to fix it, but I believe the thing that finally help me with them was that I completely shut off my lights for a few months and kept the blinds around around the tank closed. Besides that, my home is mostly kind of dim because we lamps primarily for light. During this time, I have also done minimal water changes, and at some point, I cut my skimmer off for a while. So, fast forward to today, and I have been cutting aquarium light back on, and it appears that I don't have a dinoflagellates problem anymore, thank goodness. What I have now, though, is a bunch of unappealing looking brown algae that is has grown on rocks since I've had my lights back going. So, I've been recently starting to reduce the nutrient levels in the tank and clean the tank up, but not reduce the nutrients too low or too fast. The freshwater hobbyist said of me wants to do a couple of 50% water changes to get back on track, but I'm guessing that's probably a bad idea. My tank is a 40 gal. breeder with a 20 gal. sump that about how full, so I am guessing with rock and sand, I might have about 40 gal. of water. I did about a 10% change last night.
Would it be ok for me to do several 20-30% changes, with a day or two in between to speed up the process? If not, what would be a better schedule? I only have rocks, some sand, a few snails, fighting couch and two clown fish at the moment.
Thanks in advance for any advice.
