Ok thought I would give an update. I had to change a few things. I went to a 30L for a sump, because I needed the extra water volume because the pumps I'm using were heating up the water a little bit. Ah Mag pumps got to love it .....lol So about 1 week after I started this tank I began to see an unusual amount of algae growth for a new tank. Ten days into it I knew I had a problem because I had Hair algae growing at an alarming rate. Didn't make sense, I knew I had not added enough food to the tank for this to be happening. I thought maybe it was because I had started the Bio pellets and sometimes you will get algae bloom from this in new tanks. Test were showing 0.0 ammonia PH 8.1 Nitrites .0 Nitrates .05 and I was only running lights for 8 hours a day. So where was this algae coming from? Checked levels a week later and results were .0 ammonia ph 8.0 nitrites .o nitrates .05 alk 13 cal 480 mag 1280 salinity 1.024 All levels great! Because the tank was so new and I knew what I had put into it as far as nutriuents I didn't even check phosphates thinking this would not be a problem yet. WRONG! Algae kept coming and growing fast, to the point I knew if I didn't figure it out soon I would have a real problem getting rid of it as it was quickly taking over the tank. I began to suspect that my test results were bad so I took some of my water a few days later and had it tested at Emerald Bay. Ammonia .0 Nitrites .0 ph 8.0 Nitrates .05 Alk 18 Cal 390 is what they tested. So now I'm getting desperate because although Alk had risen and cal dropped a bit levels were pretty close to what I was getting with my test kits. So I go home and decide to check phosphates and BAMM! Level was .2 on Hana Checker. I was like shocked. First off where did all this come from? Second how could I fix it quickly? So next day I get my hands on some GFO (Thanks Scott) and start a reactor. 24 hours later I checked Phos again it was down to .08, I just checked it again after running GFO for 3 days and levels are down to .03 So where did it come from, well I used 5 pieces of rock ( about 30 lbs)that were used before then dried for 7 months. Apparently I didn't get it clean enough because that's where the phosphates came from. Any way back on track now. Saturday my turbo aquatics L3 (ATS) arrived finally. I had to build a acrylic rack to hold it. So it is now done and I will be adding it today. Cleaner crew are catching up with algae and growth has slowed way down. Still a few spot I'm going to take off by hand. But over all tank is starting to look good again. :bigsmile: All Corals & fish look good and happy. I will post some pictures soon.
