Hi everyone,
I'm new to the forum so I'll provide a little background. I was given a biocube 32 for free with rocks and fish in it in July of this year. Not sure how long it has been running for. I have zero experience with reef tanks prior to this, my friend has been helping me whenever I have issues. This forum has also been incredibly helpful. I have definitely made mistakes (like adding a bunch of coral without doing research) but it's been running reasonably well (no crashes or major loss of life) but I have an issue that I can't figure out. It's got pretty significant green hair algae or bryopsis on the rocks and probably diatoms on the sand bed. Hair algae also grows on the sand that I manually remove every couple months. Twice I've had to use chemiclean for cyano outbreaks.
I do 20% water change every three weeks with water purchased from my LFS. Added copepods from algae barn a few months back.
My nutrients always test around the same using API reef master kit, most recent:
Ca 420
Kh 7 (125.3 ppm)
Phosphate 0
Nitrate between 0 and 5 ppm, very hard to tell
Any idea on the cause of the algae and why I can't seem to get rid of it? I run floss, a charcoal bag, and ceramic cones in the back chamber, mainly because that's what it came with when I got it. I feed TDO chromaboost pellets every other day. Any major issues that anyone can see?
Fish:
Clown fish
Royal gramma
Yellow coris wrasse
Fire goby
CUC:
Cleaner shrimp
Tiger conch
Turbo snail x2
Astrea snail x2
Emerald crab
Tldr: have green hair algae or bryopsis that I can't get rid of, any ideas? Let me know if there's any major issues with how it's set up in the attached pictures.
I'm new to the forum so I'll provide a little background. I was given a biocube 32 for free with rocks and fish in it in July of this year. Not sure how long it has been running for. I have zero experience with reef tanks prior to this, my friend has been helping me whenever I have issues. This forum has also been incredibly helpful. I have definitely made mistakes (like adding a bunch of coral without doing research) but it's been running reasonably well (no crashes or major loss of life) but I have an issue that I can't figure out. It's got pretty significant green hair algae or bryopsis on the rocks and probably diatoms on the sand bed. Hair algae also grows on the sand that I manually remove every couple months. Twice I've had to use chemiclean for cyano outbreaks.
I do 20% water change every three weeks with water purchased from my LFS. Added copepods from algae barn a few months back.
My nutrients always test around the same using API reef master kit, most recent:
Ca 420
Kh 7 (125.3 ppm)
Phosphate 0
Nitrate between 0 and 5 ppm, very hard to tell
Any idea on the cause of the algae and why I can't seem to get rid of it? I run floss, a charcoal bag, and ceramic cones in the back chamber, mainly because that's what it came with when I got it. I feed TDO chromaboost pellets every other day. Any major issues that anyone can see?
Fish:
Clown fish
Royal gramma
Yellow coris wrasse
Fire goby
CUC:
Cleaner shrimp
Tiger conch
Turbo snail x2
Astrea snail x2
Emerald crab
Tldr: have green hair algae or bryopsis that I can't get rid of, any ideas? Let me know if there's any major issues with how it's set up in the attached pictures.