What was your water schedule like this summer? Lots of people have exceptionally relaxed maintenance during the summer months. If this is the case not doing water changes frequently has already been tried and more likely the cause of the problem more then a potential solution.
If lights off kills the ugly pest like stuff you have it will release phosphates and nitrates into the water. Turn the lights back on again and the environment will be primed for it to grow all over again.
Many people are stumpted as to where this sort of stuff comes from. In a diverse reef aquarium there is a multitude of organisms that can become out of hand like this when the conditions are ideal. If you found you could remove this specific pest by removing the silica from the water you may find that another form of bacteria or algae take it’s place as the phopshates and nitrates are still there.
I don’t believe raising the Mg would help in this case(though that is just a gut feeling). Typically raising the Mg is a remedy used to kill off Bryopsis and this is certainly not Bryopsis(consider yourself lucky it is not)
Raising alk to ~8-9dKH at least if it is lower would be a good call.
Raising pH to 8.2-8.3 is always beneficial to maintaining a healthy reef aquarium. Ventilate the area the tank is in with fresh outside air. If you have a skimmer consider a CO2 scrubber. Maintain natural levels of Ca, Alk, and Mg. Make sure there is plenty of water movement near the surface of the tank. Run a refugium or any frag tanks on a reverse day light schedule or for 24 hours.(not 24 hours in the case of the frag tank)
Rowa phos is another brand of GFO and I could be wrong, but I believe all GFO absorbs Phosphates and some silica.
I know in the past my kh has always been around 7 as for ph I have no clue. I run a skimmer with a c02 scrubber on it since the tank has been up and the air injection I usually have set to max. I have a light on the fuge but not a plant grow bulb since the bulb went bad and I need to buy another. I usually run that from 8pm-8am.
My fuge is a eshopps r-200 with 2 rows filled with miracle mud and one with sand and caulerpa. I was supposed to trade some of that for some cheato but that never happened yet.
If I am able to make it to meeting and no one else speaks up I can bring you some Chaeto. Would likely be better if you found someone who could be more sure of their schedule.
What is the Ca and Mg?
How often have you replaced the GFO/done water changes?
When was the last time you replaced the CO2 scrubber media?
I try to do atleast 5 gallon w/c weekly sometimes I do 10-20gallon if I miss a w/c. Before the weekend I did a 5g w/c and a 20g w/c the week before.
Just tested the water also
Nitrite - 0
Ammonia - 0 (before it sat for a bit it showed up .5 but went down to 0)
Kh - 7
Ca - 440
Mg - 1125
Co2 scrubber I changed out about a month or 2 ago and it is exhausted. Just refilled with fresh stuff.
I just started using Phosban in a reactor recently and swapped it out for the ROWA stuff just the other day.
Mg-
I wouldn’t suspect super high Mg will help, but natural levels will(bring it up to at least 1290ppm) . Have you been adding Calcium and carbonates and ignoring Mg? So many hobbyist don’t bother to test Mg or ignore it after many tests show it is where it should be however you can’t forget. There is a lot more Mg in the water and corals use a lot less of it, but if you use significant amounts of Calcium and carbonates you can bet Mg is being used up as well.
I have not dosed any of my tanks in probably atleast a year or better. Though last night I did dose with Brightwells magnesion and Kent’s pro buffer dkh. I siphoned out a lot of it today. It seemed to be a mix of the stringy algae and some hair/turf algae. The stringy(snot algae) did not seem to cut back on its own from the past couple days. Maybe that ROWA phosphate stuff is working?
When there are multiple types, which I believed I saw in the video as well, but hard to tell, then it is likely not something unique that requires special treatment. More food going in then fish waste is coming out. If you don’t believe you can keep the fish healthy and reduce the amount of feeding filtration or dilution is the answer.
Typically in a balanced aquarium it shouldn’t be necessary to test ammonia or nitrite unless there is major issues.
If you think things appear to be getting weaker keep using GFO/phosphate removers(again it really does not matter what brand just that your using it and replacing it bare minimum every 2 weeks while you are still having issues.)
a ph meter would be a big help… i believe a lot of problems can be linked to ph issues.
and i think just about all plant matter grows better in lower ph enviros then higher ones… to an extent.
Alot of people have great tanks and never owned a meter, but if you’re having issues of any kind, having an accurate ph measurement is priceless imho
and Jon u said somewhere about skimming… next time i do a setup i’ll over skim the hell out of it… it doesnt seem like the heavily skimmed tanks have all these algae issues… ::
anyway… ph, i never used to really care about it, but i think its a bigger piece of the puzzle… at least if your like me that has a house/ setup that lowers ph
Thanks for the help guys.
After siphoning the brown snot most of it is showing up again today. I will siphon out some more tonight and do my w/c.
I will keep up on the gfo. I think I may do a order with BRS and get a dual gfo reactor so I can do carbon also. Might even get 2 reactor sets so I can hook one up on my smaller tank.
Aww Man, tell me about it… when mine was at its peak, we could clean it all off and say ahh, the tank looks good, an hour later BOOM, its back like a freakin magician…
It seemed like a loosing battle for me for months… only sense i could make is keep letting it grow, and export (siphon, filter, gfo…whatever) it out, along with whatever nutrients its thriving on…
It aint pretty though… we fought it hard forever, then like i said, woke up and it was gone one day… never really sure why, but i hit it with a ton off diff things over at least 6 months Time…
Ouch.
I hope I can get it under control before it kills any more corals. So far I only lost one and its hitting my candycane hard and some zoa’s. Some of the zoa’s are refusing to open up
It would irritate my zoos quick also, the mrs would take a turkey baster and blast around all the coral almost daily when it was bad… the zoos always opened up couple hours after a real good blasting session… just a little of that algae on even the outer trunk of a zoa would seems to tick off the whole colony…
Ive had a slimey problem for a while in the frag tank. sand bed definitely needs cleaning, but its covered in frags. so i have tried the chemiClean treatments also,with water changes, and had some success. keep the fuge clean, net out the slime. and after a white out from overloading my ne bio pellet reactor, had some losses after i removed ot to clear the white out. but now im starting it again, slowly, a heaping tablespoon of peeltes added per week, its looking better. just dont do a CHEMICLEAN TREATMENT with a pellet reactor running. i really dont know if that caused the bacteria white out , but it may have. so back to a crawl for change.
some hair algae on the sand is nearly gone, and the snot or brown slime grows more slowly on the glass.
Getting better every day,
Little by little in every way.
Ken as the biggest advocate for deep sand beds you sure make it sound like a ton of work. It seems as if it’s always causing more harm then good because it needs cleaning. Just an observation.
well , my main problem is its been a few years since ive even stirred up or vacuumed the frag tank sand bed. i cant , its covered with frags on the sand. a little cleaning would help. and is recomended. So i try using bacteria and biology to do the work at the micro level.
Maybe you could sell some frags to the members in the reef club to free up some space. Or take a trip down to Dr. Mac’s if you don’t want to share with your friends from the reef club.
no access to the sand between the frag plugs for a cuke, and most of them are still frags themselves. the things that take up the most room ar common stuff like monti digi and pociillapora, and the dang Derasa clam. it just keeps getting bigger.
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