What is Going On??

roadkeel · Feb 18, 2014

I set my Biocube 29g up the past Saturday. I used RODI water, 20 lbs of live sand, and 17 lbs of live rock. Today was the first day no one was at home during the day and i left the white lights on all day.

Got home tonight and my rocks have turned brown and there are places where is looks like it has pin head size bright white lights in the brown (I think they are bubbles) and every so often a bubble will float to the top. It was not very bad when I first got home, just one bubble every minute or so, but now it seems the bubbles float to the top much more often, sometimes in bunches.

Have I done something wrong? Should I have not left the white lights on all day?

Any help or advice will be greatly appreciated..

Thanks

Reefing Madness · Feb 18, 2014

Na, you did nothing wrong but speed up the Diatom Bloom. No biggy, it'll right itself in time, no worries. Oh, and in the future, ya really don't want to leave the lights on all day.

KoleTang · Feb 18, 2014

+1, Diatoms. They feed on all the silicates from the new rock and sand. They will die once they run out.

If you don't have any livestock in the tank, turn off the lights. No point in giving algae a chance to grow when it isn't necessary.

roadkeel · Feb 18, 2014

Thanks for your help. That makes me feel better.

While the windows are across the room from the tank, it was nice and sunny here today and if I had been home I wouldn't have had on any of the house lights. So is it OK to leave the lights in the tank off for the entire day when it is sunny? I don't have a timer yet. That may need to be my next purchase.

Also, a couple of my rocks were really white, like they had been bleached, but I was there and actually picked them out of the live rock tank at my LFS. The couple that were really white are green tonight instead of brown. Is that diatom bloom as well?

Reefing Madness · Feb 18, 2014

You don't actually have to run any lights whiel the tank cycles, theres really no need.
The rock, if it was Live Rock, the white on it would be dead coralline, and the green would be just algae growing, all normal.

roadkeel · Feb 18, 2014

Well I may have made a mistake, but the live sand bag said to go ahead and put live rock and invertebrates in as soon as the salinity and temp was good in the water. So I put 2 dime sized hermits in Sunday night. They seem to be happy (not sure how I would know if they were unhappy) but they are climbing all over the rocks and the sand bed. Right now one of them is up in the middle of all the bubbles on the rock and making more bubbles go up to the surface.