Quote:
Originally posted by drk70
My understanding of a UV sterilizer is you have a UV bulb contained in a tube in which you pump water through and is exposed to the UV light. Whatever goes through it is killed by the UV light I believe. The problem is it is not discriminate, it will kill the good stuff too.
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That's what we thought. Since the algae is on the sand, glass and rocks, I guess the only way the uv will kill the algae spores is if you swish it up into the water column. I was talking to our lfs today (these guys are awesome, btw!!) and John told us to just stir up the sand bed, let the filter socks gather all the crap, use a ph to spray stuff off the rocks, let the filer take it all down, then replace the socks. Do this every day for several days and it should pretty much eliminate our algae problem and bring down our nitrates (which is probably what is causing our algae problem!!) So, today I put clean filter socks on, swished up the sand bed a bit and sucked up the red slime out of the refugium. Tomorrow I will do all this again...and the next day and the next. Until our nitrates and algae are pretty much gone.
I'll keep you all posted how this affects our water parameters. I'm a little concerned about all the crap in the sand bed getting into the water column and doing nasty things. So, on advise, I am doing just a 1/4" of the sand bed depth at a time. We'll see what happens.