petemichelle
Well-Known Member
can anybody give me an idea of how long the initial diatom stage is going to be on a new tank? I have a 150 gallon tank with a 30 gal sump. the systems been up and running for about 2 1/2 months. the initial ammonia, nitrite cycle was over in about 6 weeks. the diatoms didn't start till after that, about 2 weeks or so ago. it came on slow, and now it's at a pretty good full rage. i started with dry rock and live sand (oceans direct #0 sugar fine). I have no fish yet.. I have been adding pods every week to try and seed the system since I started with dry rock. I put in 2000, then 8000 according to the place I bought them from (reefs2go). I don't know if they were actually that many but there were a lot. I have also added some bristle and spaghetti worms from IPSF. also have about 30 astra turbo snails in there and 6 hermits. will be adding more of a clean up crew later this week. I bought the ready made clean up crew with hermits from ReefCleaners. my nitrates are less than 5, phosphates are .04 or less. I used 2 different red sea test kit for the nitrates and a red sea phosphate, and hanna checker for the phosphates. I also used a silicate test kit from salifert and it say there are 0 silicates in my water as of today. I have been feeding 8ml of photo feast a night, and a pinch of flake food in the display and a pinch in the sump refugium. this is to try and encourage the pods to multiple and get established. my magnesium is 360, cal 420 and my alk is 8.1. no matter how much alk I add it just drops back down really supper fast and stabilizes at 8.1 I am currently dosing 180ml of soda ash, and 100ml of calcium. I know it's a lot but if I lessen it, the alk just dives and has gone all the way to 5.1 when I wasn't dosing at all. I have tried switching to bi-carbonate instead of the soda ash but that didn't help either. I switched back to stabilize mu ph which stays right around 8 to 8.2. the lighting cycle is about 8 hours. I say about because it actually ramps up and ramps down in a 10 hour period.
so the question is how long for this diatom stage? I'm not looking for an answer to hold you to, so please don't be hesitant to reply. also if anybody has an answer or suggestion about the alk please also chime in. I personally think it's the sand and rock. I did a test where I added the 130ml of alk which raised the alk. after an hour or two I took about 32oz of water out, tested it. it was say 9.0. I left the sample alone for a couple of days. the tank dropped back down to 8.1 in one day, even with the dosing of 180ml broken up into 24 doses (once every hour). after 2 days I tested the water that I had saved, it was still 9.0. I then added some rubble rock left over from the rock I put into the tank. guess what, the alk immediately took a nose dive. since i was not dosing the sample water it dropped 1 1/2 dkh a day until was in the 5's. still after all this, i still don't know what to do about it. I guess leave it as is, dosing the same amount until the rocks and sand get saturated and allows the water to keep the alkalinity in it.
so the question is how long for this diatom stage? I'm not looking for an answer to hold you to, so please don't be hesitant to reply. also if anybody has an answer or suggestion about the alk please also chime in. I personally think it's the sand and rock. I did a test where I added the 130ml of alk which raised the alk. after an hour or two I took about 32oz of water out, tested it. it was say 9.0. I left the sample alone for a couple of days. the tank dropped back down to 8.1 in one day, even with the dosing of 180ml broken up into 24 doses (once every hour). after 2 days I tested the water that I had saved, it was still 9.0. I then added some rubble rock left over from the rock I put into the tank. guess what, the alk immediately took a nose dive. since i was not dosing the sample water it dropped 1 1/2 dkh a day until was in the 5's. still after all this, i still don't know what to do about it. I guess leave it as is, dosing the same amount until the rocks and sand get saturated and allows the water to keep the alkalinity in it.
