Kinda new to reefing. A little help please?

[Dj City]

Hello...
I'm new here. Been into fishkeeping for years but I'm still learning about reefing. I've had my tank up and running for about 3 years now and recently started adding corals.

I love them but they can be a pain in the butt!

I have a 110gal display with about 30 gal of sump. I have a large amount of live rock.
I have a SCA 302 protein skimmer, fluval sea led lights and current usa orbit marine led lights. I have Maxspect Gyre XF-150 and jeabo cp40 on opposite sides of three tank and two jecod rw8's.
Fish I have...
1 yellow tang (small)
1 Nason tang (small)
1 maroon clown (large for clown)
1 snowflake clown
1 saddleback clownfish
2 3 stripe damsels
3 chromis
1 dottiback

1 carpet
1 bta
Various corals (if I can figure out how to post pics, I will show what I have)
I think I figured it out. (Also need help with coral names)

I have always had a nitrate problem with nitrates hovering around 40ppm. No phosphates. Cal at 500.
All other parameters are great.

PH.......................8.2
KH......................196.9
dKh....................11
Calcium............500
Magnesium.....1485
Phosphates......0
Nitrate.............40
Salinity............1.023
Temp................80°

Never had an algae problem......till now.

To help reduce nitrates, I recently added a biopellet reactor and a reactor for seachem de☆nitrate. I have 5 500ml bottles in the reactor for a total of 2500ml of De☆nitrate. I have the flow going through the reactor at just under 40gph. I've also started dosing hydrogen peroxide.

After 3 days of having the de☆nitrate reactor up and running, I'm starting to see green hair algae for the first time in this tanks life.

I don't know what's causing it.
I'm asking you guys to help me out of you can

 

[Leslie Tabor]

Well I am fairly new to this as well but it is my understanding that phosphate is what facilitates algae growth. A lot of ppl here have nitrates that high and don't worry about it. What are you testing with? And is that a recent test result?

 

[Andrewalex11]

I can't see any algae just a fat cluster of Green Star Polyps. I'd give it some time, maybe a nice water change to manually remove to nitrates and then running the reactor on a fresh base would probably help out instead of relying on it to remove the nitrates for you.

Questions to assess why you could have this issue:

How often do you waterchange? And how much?
Do you use RO/DI?
Test your water for nitrates before mixing it up for your reef?
What's your whites and blues set to?
What's your lighting cycle?
Retest your phosphates recently?
Are you using any kind of GFO?

 

[Dj City]

More pics...

Hippo tang died.
Blue damsel died. (Had him for 3 years)
I forgot to mention the cinnamon clownfish

 

[Andrewalex11]

Did you test for ammonia at all as well? We're the fish looking ill at all?

 

[Dj City]

The readings I posted are from today's testing.
I do not run gfo.

I scraped algae off glass today.
Here are pics

of the algae starting to grow.

 

[Dj City]

All this algae popped up yesterday. I've always had a nitrate problem but never an algae problem.

I want to get this under control before it gets out of hand.

 

[Dj City]

I started dosing hydrogen peroxide to deal with this stuff...

 

[Dj City]

Ammonia 0

 

[ReefRebuild]

Love the tank. Love the softies. I have been considering changing from my black background to a blue. Really like the way it looks.

 

[Dj City]

Fish look and seem happy and healthy.
Blue hippo came down with ich. Don't know what happened to the blue damsel. He just disappeared.

 

[Dj City]

Love the tank. Love the softies. I have been considering changing from my black background to a blue. Really like the way it looks.

Thank you
I wanted to set up something different looking form everyone else tank. My aqua scape is most definitely different.

 

[beaslbob]

Looks to me like you're doing pretty well.

I am very suspicious of chemicals and reactors especially to consumer nitrates. One reason being they use anaerobic bacteria and toxic chemicals which can stress fish.

The death of the Hippo and new algae may be related. More nutrients and the hippo is no longer eating algae.

I like refugiums and macro algae. which consume ammonia/nitrates/phosphates/co2 and returns oxygen, fish and coral food.

there are also things like molly miller blennys that eat the algae

 

[NickNiz]

Agreed beaslbob.
A refugium with macroalgae would help in reducing phosphate and nitrate in the long run.

Those nitrates are really high, and the salinity should be 1.025 to 1.026 ideally. Unfortunately now that you have coral, ich will be very difficult to treat unless you have a QT. unless new reef safe treatments have been discovered recently, it'll have to run its course.

For a temporary fix on the algae, I'd turkey baste it off the Rock and let it be filtered out. You should also do water changes until the nitrates are <20 and then add a team of turbos or emerald crabs to keep algae growth under control. Don't do too large of water changes too often, as that'll give ich-infested fish more stress than they should have. Hope this helps!

 

[Dj City]

My sump is complicated. No real room for a true fuge. The space I would need to grow macroalgae in order to be effective in just don't have.

Seachem de☆nitrate is not a chemical. It's effectively rock in a smaller form. It's in a reactor to have low flow and almost no oxygen to promote anaerobic bacteria to deal with nitrates.
Biopellets supposedly do the same but in a different way.

I tried to remove the algae by hand but dang if it ain't on there real good cause I sure could not remove it.
It's got air bubbles on it now.

I will take pics of my complicated sump system.

Don't laugh!

 

[Dj City]

From here it goes through the two pvc pipes to...

Here. Two 10gal tanks then a 5gal tank.

First tank has about 3" of sand and live rock rubble. Then it flows to the 2nd 10gal tank that contains the skimmer. The pump for the biopellet reactor is there as well and the outlet of reactor is right next to the skimmer intake

Then it flows to the 5gal tank that contains the return pump and live rock and rubble.

Like I said...
It's complicated.
Here's a pic of the 1st 10gal tank

 

[Dj City]

Wow!

I've come a LONG way since this was posted.

 

[brandon429]

For sure it’s great. And as promised I’ve used your three year fallow testing example hundreds of time, it’s the longest duration example of fallow oxidation testing I know of.