Flow/cyano question

Ahhh yes yes it will form bacteria. I should probably sterilize mine everyonce in a while, good call!

 

Be careful if you use chemiclean and you have a reef octopus skimmer. I never had a problem with it with the old skimmer, but after I started up the reef octopus after the water change, it foamed like crazy. As in blowing the lid off the skimmer cup in about 7 seconds. I ended up doing several water changes (and was still hauling water at that point), then hooked a tube to the bottom of the cup and just let it run into a bucket, then replaced that amount with salt water. It only took about 4 gallons before it calmed down when I was told to try that. Did get rid of the cyano though.

 

you are supposed to turn your skimmer off when using it i thought.

 

For some reason I'm in a similar situation as Kylie. My PO4 hangs around 0.02 ppm while NO3 is undetectable. However, I have large cyano patches on my sandbed. Interestingly there is no filamentous algae growth at all.. just lots of cyanobacteria. Other params:

S.G. 1.0250
Ca 430
Mg 1300
dkH 7.5 (I know this is on the low end for most tanks, but it's a Zeovit system which needs to have alk between 7 and 8)
pH around 8.0

For flow I run 4 MP40s in my 180g display. GAC and GFO run in a reactor in the sump which I replace every 5 weeks.

I also switched from MHs to LEDs recently... has anyone else had an issue with cyano when switching to LEDs?

 

you wont get a good reading of your po4 as long as you have cyano or any other algae growing. since that is what is feeding it your numbers will read on the low side.

 

I did turn off the skimmer. This was after the 48 hours and the 20% water change, when you're supposed to turn the skimmer back on. It went nuts. I finally talked to Jeremy Rykiel at Reef Octopus and he said it might take a few weeks to get it back to normal. He's who told me to hook up the tubing and just let it go to clear it out of the water.