I'm close to quitting the reefing hobby. I've been reading and browsing R2R every day looking at everyone's successful reefs and its frustrating me because my tank has been under control by GHA and Bryopsis for literally 8 or 9 months. Since then, every day I have been manually removing. I've taken out any rocks I could (some have feather dusters glued to them so that's impossible), and scrubbed them clean. In a few days the GHA pops back. I have tried Flux RX, 100% sump water changes, gravel vacuuming my sand, adding layers of black construction paper on the sides of the tank, blackouts, etc. I bumped up my CUC a ton too; adding dozens of blue legged hermit crabs, conch, pincushion urchin, 6 turbo snails, 10 astrea snails, and more. My parameters are and have been for a long time, spot on. Ill post exact parameters below.
Unless anyone has some ideas, I think the last thing to try is to do a "rip clean" method by @brandon429 . I want opinions from a few other people too if thats alright. For those that have done this and had it work, did you give your fish, corals, and inverts to the lfs for them to watch them while you drain the whole tank? I read that sometimes you should drain all water and spray it with vinegar or something. Also just to confirm, live rock in aquariums wont lose their beneficial bacteria after being dried and stuff right? Same thing with sand? Finally, if I drain all the water, should I put it in a barrel to keep it, or make new water? If I make completely new water wont I need to re-cycle my tank and wait weeks until I can get my fish back in the tank? My tank is already almost a year old so I dont want to do that again - I'm finally at the point that if I get rid of the algae my param's are perfect so I can add my dream corals.
My parents want to give away everything in the tank and make it a freshwater one because they think its too much work for me but I really don't want to do that. I just want my tank to finally be beautiful to look at, not make my parents sigh when they look at it. What is there I can do? I'm starting to go crazy lol.
I'd really appreciate it if somebody could answer the questions I have above - I'm willing to do the rip clean but I just want to confirm the methods... Thanks so much
Unless anyone has some ideas, I think the last thing to try is to do a "rip clean" method by @brandon429 . I want opinions from a few other people too if thats alright. For those that have done this and had it work, did you give your fish, corals, and inverts to the lfs for them to watch them while you drain the whole tank? I read that sometimes you should drain all water and spray it with vinegar or something. Also just to confirm, live rock in aquariums wont lose their beneficial bacteria after being dried and stuff right? Same thing with sand? Finally, if I drain all the water, should I put it in a barrel to keep it, or make new water? If I make completely new water wont I need to re-cycle my tank and wait weeks until I can get my fish back in the tank? My tank is already almost a year old so I dont want to do that again - I'm finally at the point that if I get rid of the algae my param's are perfect so I can add my dream corals.
My parents want to give away everything in the tank and make it a freshwater one because they think its too much work for me but I really don't want to do that. I just want my tank to finally be beautiful to look at, not make my parents sigh when they look at it. What is there I can do? I'm starting to go crazy lol.
I'd really appreciate it if somebody could answer the questions I have above - I'm willing to do the rip clean but I just want to confirm the methods... Thanks so much