Vibrant Experience Progression

[Fishguy_8]

Week 5: No3- 3ppm (nyos) PO4- 0 (Hanna ulm) Alk- 8.9 Ca+- 480....

I was gone for a week so no water changes were done this week. I did a 2 day black out prior to leaving and the sand was perfectly white. Came home yesterday glass and sad totally red. The GHA is gone from the areas that were thin, but the areas that were holding strong that I couldn’t get to seem thicker and darker in color than I recall. Now that my parameters seem to have stabilized I can see a noticeable improvement in coloration specifically in a green spongodes that was washed out and is now returned to a bright green. Bubble algae is turning more silver but still rooted on the overflow. I’ll post pictures when the lights come back on.

 

[Brew12]

I have a 60g and am doing 6mL a week. RWS6605 I’d recommend keeping a watchful eye on your no3 po4 I’d get a baseline and test at least once a week, if you catch these spikes faster than I did you might be lucky enough to skip the cyano blooms.

My personal experience, along with what I've learned with helping others use Vibrant, is that the cyano that can bloom isn't NO3/PO4 related. Algae and other organics are breaking down in your sandbed which will fuel cyano. Stirring the sandbed regularly (every day or two) will help release those organics and minimize cyano.
You may also see cyano forming sheets on rock where the algae and mulm (who comes up with these terms?) are dying. A small powerhead, like a Cobalt MJ1200, is great for blasting the dead and dying stuff off the rocks and removing the food source for the cyano.

Good luck and great job documenting this!

 

[IslandLifeReef]

I have used Vibrant before and one thing I would recommend is to add a small amount of GAC in a sock to help absorb any toxins that the dying algae may release.

I also ran my skimmer wetter to remove the organics from the dying algae. I didn't have a cyano outbreak.

 

[Fishguy_8]

My personal experience, along with what I've learned with helping others use Vibrant, is that the cyano that can bloom isn't NO3/PO4 related. Algae and other organics are breaking down in your sandbed which will fuel cyano. Stirring the sandbed regularly (every day or two) will help release those organics and minimize cyano.
You may also see cyano forming sheets on rock where the algae and mulm (who comes up with these terms?) are dying. A small powerhead, like a Cobalt MJ1200, is great for blasting the dead and dying stuff off the rocks and removing the food source for the cyano.

Good luck and great job documenting this!

Interesting! Ok so I just initiated a chemiclean dosing, after the 48 hr mark I will do a water change, at that point siphoning the sandbed. How ofte /many times does it take stirring the sand bed to help rid the tank you think?

 

[Fishguy_8]

Interesting! Ok so I just initiated a chemiclean dosing, after the 48 hr mark I will do a water change, at that point siphoning the sandbed. How ofte /many times does it take stirring the sand bed to help rid the tank you think?

Also, should I run a filter sock when I stir or just let the skimmer pull the crap out? And I’m with you, who comes up with these names?!

 

[Brew12]

Interesting! Ok so I just initiated a chemiclean dosing, after the 48 hr mark I will do a water change, at that point siphoning the sandbed. How ofte /many times does it take stirring the sand bed to help rid the tank you think?

How long it takes is based on the individual system. It all depends on how dirty the sand bed is, how well you can stir it, and how effective you can remove what you stir out.

I'm not a big fan of chemiclean. It can be effective but its an antibiotic that kills the cyano. If you don't fix the underlying cause it will come back in a few month or less. You can't keep cyano out of your tank, it can be transmitted for 100's of miles via air. We want more desirable bacteria/algae outcompeting it so it can't take over.

 

[Fishguy_8]

How long it takes is based on the individual system. It all depends on how dirty the sand bed is, how well you can stir it, and how effective you can remove what you stir out.

I'm not a big fan of chemiclean. It can be effective but its an antibiotic that kills the cyano. If you don't fix the underlying cause it will come back in a few month or less. You can't keep cyano out of your tank, it can be transmitted for 100's of miles via air. We want more desirable bacteria/algae outcompeting it so it can't take over.

Yea this stuff is resilient! I’ll vacuum the sand during a water change and it’ll be white then 3 days later it starts coming back and on day 4 or 5 it’s a disaster again.

 

[Brew12]

Yea this stuff is resilient! I’ll vacuum the sand during a water change and it’ll be white then 3 days later it starts coming back and on day 4 or 5 it’s a disaster again.

I run filter socks and an oversized skimmer so I only vacuumed every other week. I did stir my sand almost daily for several weeks. I had pockets that I couldn't stir so it stayed thick for months until the CuC knocked it back. Many hermit crabs eat cyano. I'm not a big fan of most hermits but I've found the small blue legged hermits to be very reef safe. In fact, I added another 25 of them today because my original 50 had dwindled in numbers.

 

[Fishguy_8]

Week 6: no notable progress really. Below is the spot of Bubble algae that’s still there and a few other spots that have creeped back up. The GHA continues to stay gone, once I pluck it. Tedious work but I seem to be at a bit of a standstill on the gha. I have initiated daily sand stirrings as suggested above by brew12 water chemistry is: no3-3ppm po4-0 dKh-8.9 and cal-400. My sps/lps that were washing out are coloring up more and more (specifically montipora spongodes and jf jackolantern lepto). Sorry for the blue pic I forgot to get pics earlier and I’m too lazy to fire up the whites.

 

[Nick30G]

I had a massive bubble algae outbreak in my tank and decided to try vibrant. I am now 1.5 months into dosing vibrant and 75% of my bubble algae is now gone. I have nothing but great things to say about it. I was skeptical if it was going to work at first but it really did work for me. The bubble algae was covering every inch of my rock work and the vibrant completely destroyed most of it.

 

[FishTruck]

I was able to eradicate a bubble algae outbreak with 10 emerald crabs and vibrant weekly. This was followed by a cyano outbreak, and I treated that with chemi-clean. Averse effects..... one crab trashed my war coral, he is now in the sump. The others seem to have disappeared with the eradication of the bubble algae.

Now... I am getting rapidly forming brown stuff on the substrate and rocks... possibly diatoms. With regular stirring of the substrate and blowing it off with a sea squirt - it's manageable.

Slowly, I am getting back to regular water changes and admitting that I don't keep up with filter sock changes as well as I should. I am thinking about Paul Bs method of using a diatom filter to blast everything clean.

 

[Fishguy_8]

Week 7: I had some bubble algae break loose and start floating around the tank just days after my week 6 dose. The bulk of it is still there but I’m seeing some advancement here. The cyano is stuck it seems. And unfortunately now I have what seems to be the beginning of a dino outbreak. I had the prototypical brown bubbles and flagellate streamers growing between my gyre and the tank glass. I continue to pluck the gha as much as I can and there seems to be a steady holding pattern when I pluck, it stays gone. The gha is still quite easy to come loose but it’s growing at a slower rate and is all the way at the bottom on a hard to reach rock so I have to wait for it to either grow enough to be able to snag with tweezers or die off from the CUC and vibrant mix. Alk 9.2, PO4 .04, no3-3, ca- 440. I’m going to watch the Dino closely. If it doesn’t resolve quickly I’ll be deploying a new strategy to attack that problem quickly.

 

[Fishguy_8]

Week 8: just 1 day after my dose nearly all bubble algae dislodged itself and was gone the following morning. My gha is still around and dinos have officially appeared. I’m starting a treatment regiment to address that issue and upon completion I will resume my treatment with vibrant. I think it’s safe to say vibrant definitely has helped and will be something I use moving forward on both of my tanks, as to if I believe it had anything to do with the cyano and the Dino outbreak I couldn’t tell you but I would say that sometimes you have got to make a mess to clean up a mess. I let these things get out of hand years ago and now that there’s something knocking them down it opened area of opportunity for other little nasties so in conclusion.... solid product and have ordered another bottle and will use it as a long term solution towards managing my tanks.