I got dinos in my tank on week 7. I am still finishing them off at month 5.
I stopped doing water changes and have been dosing .08 ppm phosphates daily and it still drops to .01 on the hanna ulr if I skip one of my 5ml doses in a day. I am considering adding it straight to my ato.
I have 1 single marco dry rock in my tank, about 1lb chunk.
My dinos were very close to being done, and i did 1 10% water change after not doing one for a couple months, and they came back quick. There is some trace that it must have depleted causing it to return on the change.
Idk what species of dino I have, but its very hard to scrub off, and reforms within seconds if the lights are on. It does no go into the water column at night, and produces bubbles at an absurd rate. A spot to small to see with my eyes will produce a contant stream of bubbles on one of the types of rock I have. Makes for easy filtering out of the water column at least.
This is my first reeftank, and I did what I could to seed the hell out of my micro biome. Had diatoms for 2 weeks, disappeared overnight, with cloudy water coming in, added uv, 2 days later dinos came.
The dinos took over very slowly, I was an idiot and thought it was a gha, loved my ph from it, thought it was blenny food.
I just did a pretty big clean last night, siphoned my entire vollume twice back into my sump through a sock and scrubbed every surface.
My sump with lights on for 16hours a day has 0 signs of dinos, nore does my overflow by some miracle.
I have lots of bubble algae (i think) that is a very pretty emerald green, and chaeto and caulepra in my fuge.
Been dosing phos for 3 months, nitrates as well, 1 ml of chaeto grow, daily. I started silica dosing 1 week ago, and I think I just saw some diatoms for the first time this am. Hopefully its a turning point.
But I suspect whatever this white "live rock" that does not seem to be a kond of rock from the ocean, is at fault. I have no vasis for the assumption other than, i definitely think it was not in saltwater before the lfs the person that gave them to me got them from did. Its a very heavy smooth rock, almosy seems like there is 0 porous to it, aside from some smooth large holes, but it does appear to have a ton of microscopic betwork of holes just based on air escaping from it over a couple days when first placing it in the vat.
Half of my rock was dried, the other half was in 70degree water with flow for a month, then cooked at 78 for another couple months before going into my tank. I did not do water changes during the cook.
My most prominent hypothesis to me was, the chaeto droping my nutriants because I put it in during the end of the cycle, but after learning about rock binding po4, i blame the ehite and marco rocks.
