20g Help

[Dorito85]

i have a 20 gallon long tank with tons of flow and lighting. But what i am having problems with is green hair. I have tried everything the local fish store told me form emrald crabs, urchins, sea hairs, snails, and alge benny's. Please help me

P.S. Help tests good everytime its tested by anyone.

Matt

[Original Fin]

Matt,

Can you tell us what your latest readings were for Nitrates, Phosphates, and Magnesium? What do you use for top off and change water?

[MyNameIsJoe]

Matt,

Can you tell us what your latest readings were for Nitrates, Phosphates, and Magnesium? What do you use for top off and change water?

Also, how long has your tank been up and runnin'?

[MyNameIsJoe]

Oh Yeah by-the-way!!!!

[salty_dog]

Hi!

I know you said that the water always tests ok. But...99% of the time, with nuisance algea...its lack of nutrient export (too much nutrients in the water). Like someone else mentioned....ammonia,nitrite, nitrate and phosphate would be very important to know.

In general...make sure you are IMPORTING very little nutrients (very prudent feeding, not overstocking, etc) and EXPORTING nutrients aggressively (frequent water changes with good quality water, aggressive skimming, not allowing build-up in mechanical filtration, etc)

Hope this helps

[reeferbill]

I had the same problem and it was that my flow was only about 4 times the amount of gallons and my LFS Guy told me I needed 8-10 times the amount of gallons in your display. Before I got a ;arger pump for my display I took out all my rock and placed it in a lg. plastic storage bin with a powerhead that I use to use to pump water to my refugium . It took about 8 weeks and around 10 complete water changes to get the phosphates to 0. Happy Reefing!!!!

[reeferbill]

I forgot to mention I also added a 2 Little Fishes Phosban Reactor to keep my phosphates down. Good Luck!!!!

[Dorito85]

Well first off sorry about not responding sooner. The tank has been up for 2 and a half years and the test results were NITRITE= 0ppm AMMONIA= 0ppm PH= 8.4 NITRATE= oppm MAGNESIUM=1280 with 1.025 salinity. And Original fin wanted to know what i top off with and i use R.O. Water. Salty Dog asked about skimming i had it on then took it off recently cause it was not helping and noisy.

[Original Fin]

Sounds like the same deal I had. All my numbers looked good too, and yet GHA. I think the fact that there is algae in the tank has to prove the presense of nitrates and phosphates. When you have a lot of really aggressive algae, I think it can pull that stuff out of the water collumn as soon as it's imported. It could be from the type of food you're using, how much, or how often. It's more likely IMO that it's from lack of skimming and the RO that you are using.
I recently set up an RODI at home after previously using store bought RO. I also increased the size of my CUC, and within two weeks all the GHA was gone...every last bit.
When you have lots of algae, it acts as a n&p sponge, so it's important to harvest as much as you can as often ad you can to get that stuff out of the tank. Otherwise, once
you find your method of starving algae, be it cleaner water, phosban, etc, the algae die off will rerelease all that n&p back int the water and start the whole bloom cycle over again.
Are you able to test your RO for TDS? When I finally did, it was 80... bingo!

[Dorito85]

RODI? I dont know what that stands for sorry

[Original Fin]

Reverse osmosis deionized. The Final DI stage removes TDS impurities that the RO misses.

[gregony]

What do you have in your tank?

[Dorito85]

here is a current picture i just took

[TMWTim]

Just going off the pic, and nothing more, it looks like you have a pretty good film on the surface of the water. Is your skimmer working properly?

[reeferbill]

What kind of skimmer was it that was too loud? What do have for a filter? Welcome to Reefland and start cleaning your rock with a tooth brush to get rid of your algea. Once you get it under controll you can try a clean up crew to keep it clean. What about that skimmer?

[gregony]

Noticed you didn't mention alkalinity. That's important when you have coral in a tank. It looks like you have Derbesia, which normally goes away after a couple of months. The only reason it would return is if you have an unstable environment. I would agree with the other guys. Manually remove as much of the algae as possible, try a different water source, and I would try to purchase a piece of live rock with a macro algae on it. Macro algae is easier to remove on a regular basis (this is the nutrient export salty_dog was speaking of). If you don't have a skimmer, you're going to need to do more frequent water changes, twice a week or so. Also, you really should use carbon filtration, at least intermittently, especially on a 20g.