Algae stained silicone

[Chris Van Daele]

hello,

My tank is roughly a year old now and for the most part everything is going well. I had a period of a few weeks where I had an algae spike and it seems the silicone got stained red. I tried to scrub it but as you can see a little nick happened in the seam. First question is would this be something to worry about? Second question is how do you go about cleaning up the stained silicone? Thanks for your help!

 

[Jacked Reefer]

The little bit of silicone you accidentally removed is absolutely nothing to be worried about. What sort of algae bloom did you have?

 

[Chris Van Daele]

I believe it was cyano, I used chemiclean and did a few water changes and things cleaned up nicely.

 

[Homebrewer]

Soooooo I'm willing to bet this isn't the right answer, but my tank had that "feature" and I hated the way it looked. I took a razor blade and scraped it off. I held the blade parallel to the silicone (vertical in other words) and scraped it all the way to the corner. Every bit of it, in every corner. I did this probably 10 years ago without thinking much about it and fortunately I haven't had any leak issues. I've even broken the tank down twice for moves and I've never re-sealed.

Note that I am not telling you to do this, I'm just saying that's what I did and I've had no ill effects. I have no idea about the exact build of your tank and if doing this in your tank will have the same results. I am, however, curious to know if anyone else has done what I did and if there were any consequences.

 

[Jacked Reefer]

Soooooo I'm willing to bet this isn't the right answer, but my tank had that "feature" and I hated the way it looked. I took a razor blade and scraped it off. I held the blade parallel to the silicone (vertical in other words) and scraped it all the way to the corner. Every bit of it, in every corner. I did this probably 10 years ago without thinking much about it and fortunately I haven't had any leak issues. I've even broken the tank down twice for moves and I've never re-sealed.

Note that I am not telling you to do this, I'm just saying that's what I did and I've had no ill effects. I have no idea about the exact build of your tank and if doing this in your tank will have the same results. I am, however, curious to know if anyone else has done what I did and if there were any consequences.

I did do that on a 55 gallon freshwater because it had calcium buildup IN the silicone from being a malawi biotope. But after a week I got paranoid drained it and reasealed it for like 7 bucks.

I would either reseal the tank or have a pro do it for me (if I didn’t trust my abilities) less chance of getting chemicals and junk in the tank and it would 100 percent work.