What to do for a weird tank situation

[Porcupine Reefer]

A couple months back, I made a big mistake of putting unfiltered tap water from my bar sink into my reef tank because I was being lazy, and while nothing happened immediately it eventually messed everything up in my tank. As a result I got a massive bloom of green hair algae and dinoflagellates, which at first I thought was cyanobacteria, and as a result I wasted my time and money on a chemi clean treatment twice in a row. I started to feed my fish more after reading that it is one of the solutions to fix dinoflagellates blooms, then treated the tank with flux Rx to kill the green hair, but during the 14 days I notice some but not all of my fish have fin rot. I read that fin rot is caused by bad water quality, but then I know that you need to increase phosphate and nitrate to combat the dinoflagellates. I thought that I would give chemi pure elite or blue a try but I know that dinoflagellates thrive in low to zero nutrient water, but algae thrives in higher phosphate water. I might have over fed my fish, but overall this whole thing ticks me off and I don't want my fish to suffer, what should I do for the tank going forward and how not to make things worse.

 

[fish_collector]

You've got a lot going on there. With the limited amount of info about your tank and it's current condition, I'd suggest doing a few 25% water changes with salt water made from known good rodi, vacuuming the gravel to remove any detritus, and assuming you have a protein skimmer, make sure it is in good working order and skim wet for a while to remove as much organics as possible. Make sure you have extreme surface agitation for good gas exchange.

For fin rot, erythromycin works pretty good but improving the water quality helps as well. In extreme situations where the fin rot is more than just ragged edges, treating in a hospital tank might be necessary.

For GHA, pull out as much as you can, take out heavily overgrown rocks and scrub with a toothbrush in a bucket of old tank water and then return it to the tank. Sometimes Reef Flux will get rid of GHA and sometimes it won't. Manual removal has worked for me.

I wouldn't dose anything until you get the water quality excellent, and by that I mean a pH of 8.0 or better, Nitrate 40 or less and Phosphate 0.2 or less. Those numbers are high by a lot of standards but are still workable. DO (disolved oxygen) is critical but as I have mentioned, extreme surface agitation typically solves this aspect of water quality.

For dinoflagellates, there's no single good option to get rid of them. Daily siphoning, maintaining N and P above zero, and patience is all I've got for that. I am currently dosing hydrogen peroxide for an unrelated matter in my tank, and that seems to have also really knocked down activity in the sand, some of which was likely dino growth. You may want to read up on it's use for dino control.

 

[Mr. Mojo Rising]

Above is very good advice. Slow down, tackle one thing at a time, no bottled products, do it all naturally. It took me 5 months to beat dino's, it takes time and constant effort and manual removal.

The algae is consuming the nutrients, if you add nutrients when you have an algae problem, the algae prospers, don't feed the algae.

For the fin rot, take a couple of pictures in white light so the fishmedics can evaluate.

Are you doing regular water changes?

Pictures of the tank, parameters, details on filtration and fish load, will all help us provide more info to you.