Z
Zakk
Guest
Anyone have any tips here, I'm getting frustrated....
I have an outbreak of brown stringy algae, very fast growing. Has chased almost all the corals in except for a few, but it is growing on everything. i can vaccum it out, and the substrate has more on it within an hour. Here are my current tank stats (all with very new, or even multiple test kits)
ALK: 201
Ca: 440
Mg: 1350
NO2: 0
ORP:~350
NO3:~8
Salinity: 1.026
NH3: 0.00
PO4: 0.03
Now I have recently upgraded lighting and added in a bit more aragonite sand, but the lighting came about a week before the outbreak, and the sand about a week after. I am running BRS hi cap GFO, and rox carbon. Skimmer is skimming very wet, and either skims wet or not at all if I try to adjust. I have stepped up water changes to 18g daily, vacuuming out the loose algae where possible (it stinks if left in a bucket for more than an hour). I will post a pic of the stuff below.
I did recently get some 'used' salt that may be suspect, when I run the checks on the mix they all are 0 except the ammonia which is supposed to be yellow or blue/green, but instead is milky white (maybe that is off the charts, I don't know).
Lighting has been reduced to 8 hours per day, but an actinic strip runs for 10. There is a ton of water movement in there (3 powerheads, 2 1300gph return pumps). The sand and tank had been pristine for ~two weeks (I had neglected the tank and am bringing everything back from the brink). Put it this way, the cyano and hair algae I had went away a lot quicker than this did when I improved my water parameters.
Sorry for the long post, I just know some of you guys have really good tank results, and I'm scratching my head here, can't figure out what I'm missing.
I have an outbreak of brown stringy algae, very fast growing. Has chased almost all the corals in except for a few, but it is growing on everything. i can vaccum it out, and the substrate has more on it within an hour. Here are my current tank stats (all with very new, or even multiple test kits)
ALK: 201
Ca: 440
Mg: 1350
NO2: 0
ORP:~350
NO3:~8
Salinity: 1.026
NH3: 0.00
PO4: 0.03
Now I have recently upgraded lighting and added in a bit more aragonite sand, but the lighting came about a week before the outbreak, and the sand about a week after. I am running BRS hi cap GFO, and rox carbon. Skimmer is skimming very wet, and either skims wet or not at all if I try to adjust. I have stepped up water changes to 18g daily, vacuuming out the loose algae where possible (it stinks if left in a bucket for more than an hour). I will post a pic of the stuff below.
I did recently get some 'used' salt that may be suspect, when I run the checks on the mix they all are 0 except the ammonia which is supposed to be yellow or blue/green, but instead is milky white (maybe that is off the charts, I don't know).
Lighting has been reduced to 8 hours per day, but an actinic strip runs for 10. There is a ton of water movement in there (3 powerheads, 2 1300gph return pumps). The sand and tank had been pristine for ~two weeks (I had neglected the tank and am bringing everything back from the brink). Put it this way, the cyano and hair algae I had went away a lot quicker than this did when I improved my water parameters.
Sorry for the long post, I just know some of you guys have really good tank results, and I'm scratching my head here, can't figure out what I'm missing.