dismayed
11/04/2007, 02:50 PM
I was having a problem with diatoms, then green hair algae, and a little bit of red slime algae at one point (mostly the hair though). I've managed to take care of everything, I thought I would pass my tips on to others.
First, I was doing a water change every week but only about 5%. I upped this to 10% every Saturday.
I cut back on lighting to 8 hours a day.
I "vacuumed" up all the sand in my tank that had algae on it.
I medicated my tank with one shot of Chemiclean for the red algae.
I quickly took my live rock out of the tank and knocked off all the hair algae with a tooth brush and quickly put it back into the tank.
I performed two 50% water changes a few days apart.
I added a bag of activated carbon and a bag of Phosguard to my tank.
I added a fan and adjusted my tank heater to ensure the temperature wouldn't exceed 79.0 ^F.
I added lots of critters. Various snails, a konch shell snail, red and blue legged hermits, and a couple of lettuce nudibranches. Around 25 critters in all in my 24 gallon AquaPod.
I added a small power jet to rough up the water a bit.
I added a cool little Fission NanoSkimmer to clean the surface water.
My LFS pointed out to me that although my cleaning of my sponge filters every week was a good thing, I shouldn't have been doing it with chlorinated tap water as it kills the good bacteria. I started using my tank source water instead.
I noticed the area back behind the partition of my tank, where the filters are, was quite dirty. So one of my water changes I put the changing hose right in that compartment and sucked out most of the gunk.
It seemed like no one thing helped, as I tried many of these techniques individually. But when I finally combined all of these and hit the tank at the same time things improved. Water tests today have confirmed that all of my metrics are right about where they need to be.
First, I was doing a water change every week but only about 5%. I upped this to 10% every Saturday.
I cut back on lighting to 8 hours a day.
I "vacuumed" up all the sand in my tank that had algae on it.
I medicated my tank with one shot of Chemiclean for the red algae.
I quickly took my live rock out of the tank and knocked off all the hair algae with a tooth brush and quickly put it back into the tank.
I performed two 50% water changes a few days apart.
I added a bag of activated carbon and a bag of Phosguard to my tank.
I added a fan and adjusted my tank heater to ensure the temperature wouldn't exceed 79.0 ^F.
I added lots of critters. Various snails, a konch shell snail, red and blue legged hermits, and a couple of lettuce nudibranches. Around 25 critters in all in my 24 gallon AquaPod.
I added a small power jet to rough up the water a bit.
I added a cool little Fission NanoSkimmer to clean the surface water.
My LFS pointed out to me that although my cleaning of my sponge filters every week was a good thing, I shouldn't have been doing it with chlorinated tap water as it kills the good bacteria. I started using my tank source water instead.
I noticed the area back behind the partition of my tank, where the filters are, was quite dirty. So one of my water changes I put the changing hose right in that compartment and sucked out most of the gunk.
It seemed like no one thing helped, as I tried many of these techniques individually. But when I finally combined all of these and hit the tank at the same time things improved. Water tests today have confirmed that all of my metrics are right about where they need to be.