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- May 9, 2019
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Been having some serious nuisance algae recently. I initially thought it was diatoms, but now I'm beginning to think it's actually cyano. What do you think?
Tank is about a year old (was set up with seeded live rock). I only use RODI water (tds 0). Everything was looking great and then my nitrates and phosphates bottomed out. All the gha and chaeto in my sump died off. I disconnected my gfo reactor, but it was too late. I ended up with a bad cyano outbreak. My live rock was basically completely covered in cyano. I used red slime remover, which I've used in the past with great results. This time it didn't do anything. I repeated it 48 hours as per the instructions. Still didn't do anything. I waited a week and did another course. The cyano was finally gone leaving behind this reddish brown stuff. By this point, my skimmer had enough and started overflowing like crazy. In addition, almost all of my turbo snails died off. The combination of all this caused a nitrate spike to 40 and phosphates to about 1. I did a couple of water changes and added the gfo reactor back. Currently got my nitrates down to 10 and phosphates 0.02 but I haven't noticed any change in this algae.
It initially was easy to turkey baster off the rocks, but now some of it stays stuck to the rocks regardless. It also seems to be photosynthetic as well as it seems to recede a little at night and tends to come back as the lights ramp up.I'm also starting to see some definitive cyano starting to come back on the rocks.
Appreciate the help!

Tank is about a year old (was set up with seeded live rock). I only use RODI water (tds 0). Everything was looking great and then my nitrates and phosphates bottomed out. All the gha and chaeto in my sump died off. I disconnected my gfo reactor, but it was too late. I ended up with a bad cyano outbreak. My live rock was basically completely covered in cyano. I used red slime remover, which I've used in the past with great results. This time it didn't do anything. I repeated it 48 hours as per the instructions. Still didn't do anything. I waited a week and did another course. The cyano was finally gone leaving behind this reddish brown stuff. By this point, my skimmer had enough and started overflowing like crazy. In addition, almost all of my turbo snails died off. The combination of all this caused a nitrate spike to 40 and phosphates to about 1. I did a couple of water changes and added the gfo reactor back. Currently got my nitrates down to 10 and phosphates 0.02 but I haven't noticed any change in this algae.
It initially was easy to turkey baster off the rocks, but now some of it stays stuck to the rocks regardless. It also seems to be photosynthetic as well as it seems to recede a little at night and tends to come back as the lights ramp up.I'm also starting to see some definitive cyano starting to come back on the rocks.
Appreciate the help!


