thinking of giving it up.....

[skelator]

hey guys i havent been on here in a while. let me start by saying ive had my 46g bowfront since 1998 and ive always enjoyed having a great looking tank. until maybe a year and a half ago ive only done fresh water. for the past year and a half my 46g has been a fish and coral tank. for a while everything was going great. coraline everywhere, coral was growing it was slow but growing and i was ok with that. i started having green hair algae problems. i used purigen in a cannister filter. i set up a gfo reactor. i had prolly 70lbs of rock and 40 lbs live sand. i was doing 5 gal a week in water changes. i dont even come close to overfeeding. if anything i underfeed. i have a aquamaxx hob skimmer. ive ran with and without a canister filter to see if it made a difference. i actually think its better with the canister filter. the tank looks disgusting and just the sight of it angers me. all that time and money and it actually takes away from the room. all my rocks are covered in green crap. ive tried seaklear and all that did was kill all my coraline. it pretty much just turned the green crap brown. i havent used the seaklear in quite a while as i like the coraline and the coraline is starting to come back as of now.

today i drained 13 gallons or so and i scrubbed everything and i set up the canister filter again to get out all the floating debris. im entertaining removing all my rocks and just tossing in a couple dead rocks ive had but never used to see if its something in my rocks. some of my rocks i bought live so i dont know if they are saturated with phosphate or something to cause this.


im wondering if i i scrap the coral idea and just use a regular light and not all my leds it will help with the algae?

sorry that was kinda all over the place i have 5 gals of rodi warming up now to finish off the water change. i really like the tank and the fish that i have but im getting to the point where im seriously considering going back to a chiclid tank again....... any thoughts or advise? thanks, Mike

 

[eliramos]

What kind of fish do you have?

 

[skelator]

hawkfish, psudochromis (little pink purple guy) snowflake eel, the two tiny damsels that i cycled the tank with. oh and some weird thing that buries itself in the same it has a bunch of arms. it ate all my hermit crabs and snails. i cant remember the name of it for the life of me. i got it cuse it supposidly ate green hair algae. i didnt know it would eat my snails and crabs.

 

[Tahoe61]

I have been in this hobby seriously since 1987, trust me there have been times when I wanted to throw my tank off a balcony. To keep and maintain a reef tank it takes routine maintenance, at least weekly, no way around it. Automate everything you can automate to make it easier. Bulk up your clean up crew, get more snails. Do not clean too much at one sitting or you might crash the tank. If you think that you can not do the routine maintenance because life is just life, and it's not a priority then maybe Cichlids would be a better choice right now. It's hard going back though once you have gone salt and you've been doing it for awhile now.

Good luck to you.

 

[skelator]

i cleaned the crap out of it today just out of pure disgust. it looks alot better now. ill see what happens now. if it crashes then the decision is made for me i guess. if and when i decide to pack it up ill clean everything really good and put it away. that way when i decide to go salt again all i need is some sand and salt. i think ill get rid of whatever the hell that thing is that ate all my snails and crabs.

 

[Hellsinki]

do you know the quality of your RODI water?

 

[skelator]

according to my inline meter its about 7 tds going into my di unit then its 0 on its way out. i have a bulk reef supply unit.

 

[Breakthecycle2]

Change the RO filters.
Cut back on the light.
DO a 80% water change.

Something is feeding the tank phosphates. 40 pounds of sand in a bowfront is probably a lot in my opinion. Also, what is the flow like in the tank? What kind of filtration?

 

[skelator]

i got 2 600g powerheads one on each end of the tank. theres an aquamaxx hob skimmer and i just put the canister filter back on it.

 

[gemini9]

Hey sorry you're having so much trouble. I've had my tank up for a year and like you, I had some pretty intense struggles along the way. One of which was hair algae. Here are some of the things I did to remedy my algae. Maybe it will help you as well.

1. I put a black curtain over the window closest to my tank, to help prevent sunlight from beating in on the water. This was a contributor to the algae growth.

2. I cut my lights back a bit. My actinics are on for 9 hours a day and my tank is in full light with actinics and daylights for 6 hours.

3. During the beginning of my algae battle, I dosed my tank with a liquid called "Phostphate-E" by Brightwell Aquatics. This helps to eliminate the extra phosphates in the tank. Even if you have a test kit that doesn't show any phosphate, it may still be present. Phosphate test kits are no good because they cannot measure the phosphates being consumed by the algae.

4. I had blue filter media pads. I changed them more often than usual.

5. Bought some extra snails and a lawnmower blenny.

6. I had some rocks in the tank with excessive hair algae growth. I removed the contaminated rocks.

7. More frequent water changes.

Hope a few of these helped.

 

[glb]

I had a bad phosphate problem too that took a while to diagnose and fix but is finally getting better. Gfo reactor, water changes and cutting back on lights helped. Good luck!

 

[nelson"s reef]

Make 25% water change every 2 days

 

[sponge]

Look into using a HOB refugium,with the HOB skimmer. A HOB refugium changed my 46 for the better. I also have gone threw the GHA bloom. I did a bunch of different things,from scrubbing rocks,placing them in covered bins for weeks,changing water;just to have it come back. The Hudson River looked better!

I had picked up a pencil urchin that did to the rocks what I could not.That is rid the GHA off the rocks. The urchin can knock frags over. This is what worked for me.

 

[knotsmart]

what kind for led lights do you have? if you don mind me asking..

 

[reefboxerguy317]

What are your nitrates and phosphates levels? I've had instances where everything in my mixed reef is going well, then algae. Recently was dealing with bad case of cyano but after month of getting nitrates under control and few big water changes it's gone.

 

[-Logzor]

How old is your sandbed?

 

[Humblefish]

I overfeed, and every time I've had a nuisance algae problem running GFO religiously and going 3 day lights out, once a month every month, has fixed it. Except for cyanobacteria. I have to dose vinegar and increase WCs for that.