Need advice getting chemicals in balance

[MamaP]

I know this is going to be long, but I want to give as full a picture as possible for help. Ok, so confession, I've been really bad about testing and staying on a regular water change schedule for a long while. I'm trying to get back to my regular water changes (doing one later today), and I know changing the water and cleaning the filter will help some with my test results from yesterday, however, I need advice on certain aspects of how to get the chemical balance right and address the issues I'm having.

My results from yesterday's tests:
SG: (Hannah) 1.024 (I make my SW at 1.025)
pH: (Salifert) 7.7
dKH: (Hannah) 9.3
Phosphates: (Salifert) (too high for Hannah ULP) 1
Nitrites: (Salifert) 0
Ammonia: (Salifert) between 0 and <.15
Calcium: (Hannah) 467
Nitrates: (Salifert) 100

I have a 75g (2 years old) with several fish, a mushroom, a small halimedes, CUC - a few various snails (getting more this week), and a few hermits. Lost a hermit, my cleaner shrimp, and pretty sure my pistol shrimp this week (and possibly my porcelain crab, unless he's hiding to molt, but totally been MIA a couple weeks). I recently discovered a colony of feather dusters and I have a couple sponges that have popped up. I've been battling some GHA and I get "regular?" algae on the glass and fixtures that I clean off every couple weeks. I have a good growth of hard algae on the rocks and fixtures and some, but not a lot, corralline algae.

My setup is nothing fancy. I'm running a Fluval FX4 with the standard stock media and standard Fluval SW LED bar. Cut back on blues to try to kill GHA, so running all below 50%. 1 Ice Cap 4X gyre (getting a second this week) and 2 Hydor Koralias for flow. No dosing of anything.

I know I feed heavy (I change it up for them between LRS Reef Frenzy Nano, thawed frozen cube mixture of mysis, brine, and spirulina mixed with a few drops of Selcon, and occasionally flakes or pellets, and periodic sheets of nori, but I never see food lying around. I know my pH needs to come up, and my phosphates, ammonia, and definitely nitrates need to come down. I'm not sure why my calcium is high, because I thought halimeda absorbs it. I'm also adding a Shaving Bush this week. My thought is to out-compete the bad algae with good algae, since I don't have a sump.

I'm over-due by a week for my water change, and like I said, I'm doing it today and I know that will help some, but I'm not sure how to get everything back in check and balanced. Should I treat with something? Start dosing something? Am I doing something wrong? It was so stable for so long I had quit testing but then I got off schedule with water changes. The CUC deaths this week could be coincidence or various reasons, but it was enough to make me test, and I'm glad I did! Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

 

[MaxTremors]

A 10% or 20% isn’t really going to help your nitrates or phosphates. I would do a larger (like 50% or more) water change and then look into some methods of nutrient export going forward (consistent water changes are part of that).

Halimeda and a shaving brush aren’t very productive in terms of exporting nutrients and won’t out compete hair algae (they’re both very slow growing calcareous algaes). I would suggest getting some chaeto or caulerpa if you want to have something to export nutrients (it will be quite a while until it will out compete the GHA, there is an excess of nutrients). If you decide to go with caulerpa (and I would, chaeto doesn’t look good in a display tank) you have to keep it pruned back, if you let it get out of control it can ‘go sexual’ and basically release all of the nutrients it has eaten/absorbed back into your tank all at once, which can nuke your tank (it shouldn’t put you off using it, but just something to be aware of). Also, if you want to discourage GHA, you want to lower your white or daylight spectrum, the blue spectrum is the least beneficial in terms of algae growth. So if you have any corals, raise up the blues a little (maybe 75% on the blues and 20-40% on the daylights).

For the phosphates, you can run some GFO, it will lower them pretty significantly, but you’ll need to keep testing and make sure it doesn’t completely strip all of the phosphates, as you want a little bit (like 0.1ppm or less).

If you have a skimmer, you could try carbon dosing, but I would suggest really researching the risks and benefits of doing it, but it’s definitely a long term option for keeping nitrates (and to a lesser extent phosphates) in check.

But the short term plan should be to do some fairly large and aggressive water changes. You can also try to manually remove some of the GHA, either by taking the rocks out and scrubbing them with a toothbrush in some of your water change water, or at the very least sort of ‘power wash’ them in the tank with a turkey baster. The water changes should hopefully help with your PH. Also try raising your salinity slightly to 1.026 or 35ppm, just mix your water changes to 1.026 and over time the tank will come up (little bit weird that your tank is 1.024 if you mix to 1.025).

After the water change(s), I would do a deep dive into the various methods of nutrient export (macro algae, protein skimming, carbon dosing, water changes, etc) and decide what would work best for you long term. If you don’t have a skimmer, you should definitely get one. If you have any other questions, feel free to ask, and keep us posted on your progress.

 

[MamaP]

A 10% or 20% isn’t really going to help your nitrates or phosphates. I would do a larger (like 50% or more) water change and then look into some methods of nutrient export going forward (consistent water changes are part of that).

Halimeda and a shaving brush aren’t very productive in terms of exporting nutrients and won’t out compete hair algae (they’re both very slow growing calcareous algaes). I would suggest getting some chaeto or caulerpa if you want to have something to export nutrients (it will be quite a while until it will out compete the GHA, there is an excess of nutrients). If you decide to go with caulerpa (and I would, chaeto doesn’t look good in a display tank) you have to keep it pruned back, if you let it get out of control it can ‘go sexual’ and basically release all of the nutrients it has eaten/absorbed back into your tank all at once, which can nuke your tank (it shouldn’t put you off using it, but just something to be aware of). Also, if you want to discourage GHA, you want to lower your white or daylight spectrum, the blue spectrum is the least beneficial in terms of algae growth. So if you have any corals, raise up the blues a little (maybe 75% on the blues and 20-40% on the daylights).

For the phosphates, you can run some GFO, it will lower them pretty significantly, but you’ll need to keep testing and make sure it doesn’t completely strip all of the phosphates, as you want a little bit (like 0.1ppm or less).

If you have a skimmer, you could try carbon dosing, but I would suggest really researching the risks and benefits of doing it, but it’s definitely a long term option for keeping nitrates (and to a lesser extent phosphates) in check.

But the short term plan should be to do some fairly large and aggressive water changes. You can also try to manually remove some of the GHA, either by taking the rocks out and scrubbing them with a toothbrush in some of your water change water, or at the very least sort of ‘power wash’ them in the tank with a turkey baster. The water changes should hopefully help with your PH. Also try raising your salinity slightly to 1.026 or 35ppm, just mix your water changes to 1.026 and over time the tank will come up (little bit weird that your tank is 1.024 if you mix to 1.025).

After the water change(s), I would do a deep dive into the various methods of nutrient export (macro algae, protein skimming, carbon dosing, water changes, etc) and decide what would work best for you long term. If you don’t have a skimmer, you should definitely get one. If you have any other questions, feel free to ask, and keep us posted on your progress.

Thank you for responding.

I don't have coral, only the shroom and newly discovered feather dusters mentioned in my OP. I was running the blues higher and whites lower, but changed it after watching Dr. Tim talk about algae in the SWA video from Reefapalooza.

I don't have a sump to run any additional media (started on a budget and slowly upgrading stuff, thus the cheap not-good-enough-to-grow-corals light fixture [discovered the hard way...]).

I've read that HOB skimmers don't work well. Any suggestions?

 

[MamaP]

Thank you for responding.

I don't have coral, only the shroom and newly discovered feather dusters mentioned in my OP. I was running the blues higher and whites lower, but changed it after watching Dr. Tim talk about algae in the SWA video from Reefapalooza.

I don't have a sump to run any additional media (started on a budget and slowly upgrading stuff, thus the cheap not-good-enough-to-grow-corals light fixture [discovered the hard way...]).

I've read that HOB skimmers don't work well. Any suggestions?

Forgot to add that I did have GHA under control after original outbreak by manually removing it from sand and scrubbing the rock it was on in H2O2, but am seeing it coming back on the sand. Will be removing as much as possible by hand today, then vacuuming and water change.

 

[MaxTremors]

You can run media in whatever kind of filter you have, you really don’t need much room. There are plenty of decent HOB skimmers, I recommend the Aquamaxx HOB 1.5, it’s a little spendy (around $200), but it’s a great skimmer. That said, when I first started I used a Seaclone skimmer for years, and while it’s definitely not the best (my biggest issues with it were that it was kind of loud, required a lot of adjustments, and there would be a lot of salt creep on the output/overflow), it definitely pulled out a lot of dark, nasty skimmate. You can get one of those for like $60. I would also recommend looking for a used skimmer, so long as it’s clean and appears to be well looked after, it should be just fine.