Advice needed! Leaching Rock??

[corey.nolta]

I'm thinking about taking on a project that'll probably be a process, but I'm not sure what else to do.

Backstory- I have always fought with my nitrates and phosphates. I can never seem to keep them under 15 / .2 respectively and about every month I'm scrubbing off rocks trying to get rid of algae. I've done some reading and asked some for advice in the past and I've come to the conclusion that the problem is the rock itself. I don't overfeed (it's come to my attention recently that I probably underfeed), I do my water changes 1-2 times a month, I don't have an extreme bio load by any means (5 fish and a carpet). So I'm currently thinking it's the rock leaching?? I started my tank about 8 months ago but purchased all my rock from a member's 3 year old tank. I'm thinking maybe I didn't "rinse" it out well enough after the 3 hour drive home?? Any advice?

So, what I'm thinking about doing is setting up a temporary tank to put my livestock in and taking out all the rock work and scrubbing off all the algae and setting up a few 5 gallon buckets of fresh sw and rinsing/blowing out the rock very well. My question is this, if I were to move forward with that, how does that affect any pods/beneficial bactieria/stars/ etc etc living in the rock?? Will I lose all of that? Would it throw my tank into a mini cycle? Would this just cause more problems than it's worth? I'm just not sure what to do moving forward because I'm tired of dealing with algae all the time and having my shrooms and zoas looking like crap. Oddly enough my frogspawn and torch seem to love it and look great. I have also tried running a few different types of phosphate medias and they don't seem to do much.

I don't have a traditional setup with a sump/fuge due to lack of space, but I do run a hob skimmer. (Rated for a 100 gallon). And I also have a large chunk of chaeto (about 2 large softball size chunks)

60 Gallon
Ammonia - 0
Nitrite - 0
Nitrate - 15
Phosphate - .2
Calcium - 400
Alkalinity - 8
Ph - 8.4
Salinity - 1.024
165w led lighting unit x2 (~60%blues / ~30% whites) 10 hours blues and whites, 1 hour blues

Live stock:
Yellow tang
Tomato clown
Lawnmower blenny
Red anthias x2
Carpet nem
Few crabs/snails
Frags

Any advice would be much appreciated!

 

[melypr1985]

I dont see anything wrong with your nitrates and phosphates. Some may dissagree with me, but you do need some phosphates and nitrates to feed your corals. I would suggest reducing your photo cycle 10 hours of full lights is quite a lot. shorten that down to 4 or 5 hours with the blues on longer THEN small bioload or not do more frequent water changes. I bet my laptop youll see improvements in everything after a couple weeks of that.

 

[twilliard]

Keep that po4 down as much as you can. I like to be around .016 on my po4 (triton)