Refugium of death

[Craigb350]

For 3 years now my system has been running and the algae bed of the refugium has never worked as it should ,

I have tried many things, different lights, increasing flow in the sump increasing flow in the surface.

Problem I have is as soon as I have cheato running or culpera it always gets coverered in brown slime algae or red slime algae with bubbles. Now I know this must be out competing the cheato.

I keep having swings in nutrients in the tank and it’s never really a good method of export, so I have to run gfo and nopox to keep a check on it, which I would prefer the more natural route.

My last set up was using a 120watt full spectrum led, taken a reading last night of phos 0.012 nitrate 5ppm which isn’t too bad but not where I want it. Here’s the algae bed in the current state.

So I have drained the algae bed, cleaned it all up so get rid of any other algae, ordered some fresh cheato, I’m going to run a cfl 140watt 6200k on reverse lighting to help the ph swings and see how we go, wish me luck!

I will update on here

 

[laverda]

I would not worry about getting your Nitrate and Phosphate any lower then they are currently. You might want to try dosing iron as it may be limiting your algae growth. I have found the cheap red & Blue LED grow light really work well for macroalgae. Much better than 65K lights.

 

[Subsea]

I would not worry about getting your Nitrate and Phosphate any lower then they are currently. You might want to try dosing iron as it may be limiting your algae growth. I have found the cheap red & Blue LED grow light really work well for macroalgae. Much better than 65K lights.

+10 on not chasing numbers. Those parameters are perfect for my mixed garden macro lagoon tanks.

Are you experiencing problems in your display tank? Unless your refugium is for display, I see little problem with what you have. Continue removing undesirable algae as nutrient export.

If you want to maximize nutrient export, then quite mixing algae’s in your refugium and go with a fast growing algae like chaeto or Caulerpa as a monoculture.