I read your other posts. This is an upgrade and this can sometimes happen. It is like NTS on steroids. It happened to me when I had to switch tanks due to a leak. I honestly I don't think it was anything that you did but the balance of the tank got all fubared. I will tell you now this will not clear up easily. The moment you conquer one algae another will rear up. They seem to cycle through. I will save you time and tell you I went through the gambit of algae cures and nothing helped. Not black outs, not a live rock cleanse not even nutrient reducution. To be honest I was as close as I could without starving my fish and still algae everywhere! I understand your frustastion. I was at the point I just wanted to quit. I kept at it though and slowly can see improvement. Every new outbreak is less severe and goes away faster. The only thing I do is keep a higher mag lvl, good general husbandry and supply both a carbon source and source of the correct bacteria. It really sucks that this happened on your dream upgrade. Just try and take it easy on your hair during the process. If anyone else has experienced this tank switch horror I hope they will chime in with their experience.
Thank you for reading past posts! You can definitely understand the frustration. I know that this is a long road uphill and it will be one battle over the other. The Dino's are wiping out my CUC at the moment, and my SPS are looking horrendous. I think there have been many contributions to the reason it's in the condition it's in, starting two years ago when I first started with this dry rock. I don't think I cleaned it properly.
I have been boosting my mag for the last two weeks, @ 1540 at the moment and pushing to 1600 ppm. Also raising my Alk a small bit too (8.5 currently). I'm going dark tonight for 72 hrs, mainly to get this current Dino bloom in check, and to allow some time to tackle the other algaes. An airs tone will go in my sump for the 10 days that I run the H2O2. Though my skimmer should be enough, I just want to make sure that the oxygen levels are steady. I'm expecting a nice Red Cyano bloom soon after.... IMO all tanks have Dino's, it all depends if the fuel is there to feed the bloom. I'm having to wait this out, let the algaes eat up all that nutrient.
I will stop water changes for a month, though each week I will vacuum the rock/sand, and run the water through a filter sock. All of this will get returned to the tank. Obviously there are some serious excess nutrients in the tank and I want this algae to burn through it. I've done some large water changes over the last 7 months, having gone through 900g (4 1/2 buckets) worth of salt. This being due to several factors, breaking down the aqua scape chasing a gorilla crab, a cucumber getting killed after a acro colony fell into a hammer colony. Cucumber ended up in between the two corals, we were away for the night, came back to a tank full of snot. Anyways, tons of water has gone through this tank. I think all salt mixes have small traces of silicates, hence I've just been feeding the algaes repeatedly of the course of time. I'll be adding some long spine urchins later today, hopefully to help with the bryopsis, hair and wire algaes. And hopefully if I can keep the Dino's at bay, start rebuilding my CUC.
Thankfully I have not gone crazy purchasing coral for this tank as of yet, unfortunately what coral I do have ( minus a hand full of SPS frags) are all colonies rown from frags in my last tank. I'm trying to save what I can (back up frags) and some of the other pieces with get an H2o2 dip to hopefully remove some of the green hair also. As backwards as this sounds, I also need to start boosting my bio load. I have very little fish and a whole lotta filtration elements. I'm not a big fan of LNS, IMO it's like walking a tight rope.
Sorry, I feel like I'm rambling, not much sleep last night. Filter pad clogged the overflow in the sump, luckily caught it rather quickly but still a mess.. Thank you for everyone's inputs. I'll log everything as I go through this. Hopefully I can get this straightened out.
