Dirty sand

Resendes Reef

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What does this look like to you? Cyano? Looking close at it there's a mixture of red and green.
My phosphate was slightly elevated a few days ago. But checked yesterday and didn't detect any.

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that's not bad at all this is the cause:
new tank with highly reflective surfaces and full on lighting that would be better matched to full on sps or coral coverage. when that real estate is shined on without coral flesh and coralline and benthic deposits covering everything, the early colonizers take over and you are seeing some

we can hand guide it all out via easy siphoning during maintenance work until favorable conditions take over

the tank is low bioload so don't concern over nutrients, im twice over the normal po4 readings and am fully invader free because all my surfaces are half an inch of coralline, or a coral polyp, I took away all room and reflection in the white balance that would sustain cyano and other invaders.

in time, a pent up waste sandbed will cause cyano even in otherwise balanced conditions, but your tank is too new for that causative. The real reef we scuba dive on isn't free of cyano even with corals and coralline, there are matched grazers for it your tank doesn't have. I wouldn't bother seeking them out, or detailing nutrients just hand clean it regularly until it matures a couple years. Reducing white spectrum and increasing blue is a massive help in your issue, to reduce the hand guiding element but that's always the base action all else is tweaks. Reducing light intensity to match low light loving corals will reflect less, assist you as well

Detailing nutrients like po4 and nitrate is so unimportant to algae control, ive never owned any test kit other than temperature and salinity and will always be invader free in my tanks fresh and salt.

we make threads rolling 200 pages combined now of tank cures never asking about nutrient levels or param readouts, all it takes is removing organic stores (which you don't have yet) and hand working the tanks with the right cheats.
 
short version:
green is algae because theres lights with nothing to uptake the nutrients put off by them.
brown/red on the sand is most likely diatoms from the same nutrient source. If theres bubbles under them, it may be cyano. If no bubbles, it will go away on its own once your tank stabilizes.
 

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