CYANO AND HA TAKEOVER!

how well do your pellets tumble? whats your nitrates and phosphates?

 

Get yourself a Hana Phosphate meter, it's worth the investment!

 

Mike been there. Keep the Phosphate down and Nitrates. As it seem you have. It should be going away if they are at 0. Its all normal stages of saltwater from what I am learning. The alga scrubber will help too. Keep taking as much of both out as possible when doing water changes. I use to suck out as much as I could when doing water changes. It will balance out in time. I also used a Hot magnum to palish the water. I would put new filter on and then go to town cleaning all the HA and Cyano off sand,rocks and tank walls. You can ask people that came to my house for the meeting it look no to bad after looking really bad not but two week before. It was 10 time worse weeks prior. Getting mine controlled was Phosgaurd for Phosphate. I had low levels of .25 and when that was gone then the alga was lifting away. The Cyano went clear to white and then I sucked that out and it was almost gone. I had a little on two or three rocks and back wall with low flow. The biggest thing after that with my 29gl was the brown low water movement crap. I just needed another wavemaker. Also my Nitrates always stayed at 0 also.

Good luck

 

I would check your PH and check your RO water. I had a terrible time with CYANO not long ago nd it turned out my RO water had a large amount of TDS which was causing the issue,

 

How did you check for the TDS?  How did you mitigate this?  I think I may have the same issue.  Would adding a DI chamber to my RO system take care of this?

 

I have a tds meter. $20 ad maybe your lfs has one. Anyway I buy my RO water and when I found there was an issue I let them know and they changed their filters. If you have your own RO unit like I should, you may need to change your filter and yes you should have a DI chamber regardless that could be a issue. For what its worth I lost my nearly my entire tank because of this.

 

Filters should not be an issue since the system is only 5 months old.  It may be silicate related and I have been investigating how to add a DI chamber to the system.  Thanks for the insight. 

 

Like a few people mentioned, if your levels are low its prob locked in the HA and cyano. You need to manually remove as much as possible when possible. And it should all level out. But double check your water TDS for sure. Cut back your display light cycle too. I've also read a lot of people fix cyano by adding more flow to that area. But this seems to be an outbreak and not the minor patches here and there.

 

I think your over feeding coral frenzy! 1tsp a week should be enough .It really goes along way.

 

The problem is your feeding way too much. Just that simple. A fourth of that may be too much.

You'll quickly overwhelm even gfo's capacity at that rate. When your tank is young and doesn't have many mouths for nutrient spiralling, this is esp. Problematic (and also pretty normal).

Matt

 

You are feeding oyster feast as well? If it was me I would only do 1 or the other not both when feeding. Personally I do not like oyster feast. I only feed my corals twice a week and on those 2 days I usually do not feed my fish just to help prevent over feeding which I probably do anyway. I also turn all my pumps off and use a turkey baster over the coral I want to feed and lightly squirt them. otherwise your food goes right into the overflow and through the skimmer and other filtration.

Understand when you are feeding you're coral you are really supplementing their feeding since they get a good majority of their food from light and fish poo along with other stuff in the water column. Not to say it isn't important, just you don't need to over think it.