So today I noticed my nemo (clown fish) acting different. so I decided to do some water testing nitrate,nitrite,ph,ammonia and found my ammonia was a little high. 0.25 & nitrate was 5.0 the only two things that happened this past week. I just recently put my 400w mh light and algae grew every where. covered the walls of the tank. I added a bunch of snails but they only made a small dent in the proble it was growing to fast.So I scraped it all off. I also lost a big snail who sat in there for two days before I found him. could one or both of these have Any thing to do with my problem? it was green algae looked Like a plant just growing off the side of the tank so now I’m doing a water change
I assume you mis-placed a decimal point in your nitrate reading and it is actually .50.
Good call on the water change to get it down. Now for the reason.
First when upgrading lights it’s very important to slowly acclimate your tank to the new light. Start by only lighting for 2 hours a day, a few days later up it to 2.5 hours, then a few days later 3 hours etc.
What happened in your tank was the algae used the new brighter light as a food source and took off like wild fire. After the tank began acclimating and the existing algae used up all available nutrients in your tank it began to die off (even though it didn’t appear to have been). You began manually removing which causes more die off. The die-off of algae is causing the ammonia to spike in your tank. It’s what we call a mini-cycle.
It happens anytime you change your bio-load. When you add a fish it creates more poop which increases the bio-load which increases ammonia, thus increases the bacteria that converts ammonia to nitrite…etc. It’s just too small of a spike for you to notice and it usually goes away in a day or two.
The water change will help. If the algae was that bad I’d plan on another water change tomorrow and maybe the next day to keep your level safe for your fish.
Geat answer I thought the algae had some thing to do with it I remember reading about this some time ago. So do I still have to acclamate the lighting or is it fine? I run it about 10 hrs a day
[quote=“Reefer, post:3, topic:3645”]
Geat answer I thought the algae had some thing to do with it I remember reading about this some time ago. So do I still have to acclamate the lighting or is it fine? I run it about 10 hrs a day[/quote]
Hi Reefer, what are you growing with 400MH for 10 hours a day?
[quote=“Rosti, post:4, topic:3645”]
Hi Reefer, what are you growing with 400MH for 10 hours a day?[/quote]
Algae 
[quote=“Reefer, post:3, topic:3645”]
So do I still have to acclamate the lighting or is it fine? I run it about 10 hrs a day[/quote]
I would reduce by about 1/2 and work my way back up from there over the course of the next 2 weeks.
lOl
Ha ha very funny. Nothing just a few fish live rock and a mini carpet anemone. I have a few frags but there in a 10 gallon nano tank. But I shure can grow a hell of alot of algae but now I’ll hook it up to a timer you say 5 hrs is recommended?also today I’ll do another reading and depending on that a water change or not I was filling it with ro water all night after draining 5 gallons last night so we will see. On a tank this size 45 with a 400 mh 20,000k lightwhat would be a good lighting schedule?
my mh’s only run 3 hrs a day… at most. and only one is running. I got tired of growing brown sand.