3 week old 10g nano w/diatoms and murky water... Normal??

[tgunn]

Here's a recent shot from my 10g nano at work. I'm a bit concerned about the current water conditions. For the past week and a half I've been battling what appears to be a heavy diatom bloom along with fairly murky water:

The tank is a 10g glass nano, lit with LEDs.
* no skimmer
* Maxijet 900 return
* Koralia 1 for circulation
* 10lb well cured live rock
* ATO with RO/DI water (0ppm)
* Temp stable at 27.4C (81-82F)
* shallow sand bed (< 1" ) of coarse aragonite sand.

Timeline:
April 3: tank filled with saltwater and household ammonia used to kick start cycle; continued ammonia addition regularly and all nutrients levels out indicating cycle completed.
April 21: 10g cured live rock from LFS added; monitored and no nutrient spikes detected over the course of a week.
April 28: Added 2 small fish; clown and a dottyback, plus clean up crew consisting of 5-6 snails and some hermits, a handfull of ricordea and a small green SPS (forced tear down of my 34g Solana necessitated transferring all this at once unfortunately).
May 9: Minor diatoms on the sandbed:

May 14: Increased diatom presence on rocks and sand

May 22: Diatoms continue to be an issue (as illustrated in the first pic), except now the water is very murky as well.

Maintenance:
* Every 2nd day: Feed just enough food that the fish eat it all
* Weekly: 3-4g water change, and run power filter with filter floss after blasting rocks and stirring up the sand. Filter is run for 8 hours after cleaning and all filter material is discarded.

The past few days I've been running the power filter almost continually and keep blasting at the sand and rock to get the diatoms off. The heaviest build up seems to come off easily as a fine powder with the baster.

Anything to be concerned about here? Anything else I should be doing? Running carbon in the power filter as well perhaps? Although I'm not running one full time (bad design lead to no room in sump), should I consider running my Tunze Nano DOC skimmer for a while?

I had diatoms on startup of my former 140g tank and my 34g Solana, but never the murky water like this.

Thanks,
Tyler

 

[Japsican]

Your tank is cycling again from the new bioload added to the small 10g tank. If it were me, I'd start doing smaller daily water changes instead of the weekly 3-4g until the tank starts to stabilize a bit more. I'd also run the filter all the time and siphon the diatoms out instead of blowing it around.

Good Luck.

 

[tgunn]

Your tank is cycling again from the new bioload added to the small 10g tank. If it were me, I'd start doing smaller daily water changes instead of the weekly 3-4g until the tank starts to stabilize a bit more. I'd also run the filter all the time and siphon the diatoms out instead of blowing it around.

Good Luck.

No detectable ammonia at this point, so I presume any spikes as a result of the new livestock are being absorbed by current bloom.

Since I've been removing the power filter daily to put in new floss, I've been essentially doing 1L water changes daily. But good idea; I'll step this up and purposely change out more water at the same time.

I need to look for a more appropriately sized siphon hose for this tank -- I'm still using the one I made for my 140g tank with 1/2" hose. WAY too quick.

The power filter is doing a great job of pulling things out of the water column though; I've been running it nonstop for the past few days. Its usually saturated with brown diatoms by the end of the day, so I just dump out the water in it and discard the filter floss its filled with.

I'm sure things will stabilize in time, just never had this strong of a diatom bloom that required so much intervention before. But then I guess a 10g is a considerably different system than a 140g.

Thanks!
Tyler

 

[tgunn]

Huh, so thats interesting.
When I got to work this morning I noticed the tank was generally clear. No diatoms on the sand, and the rocks were generally clear too. As soon as the lights came on, the water started to murk up and the diatoms came out in full force. Its noon now and the rocks and sand are all covered. The power filter floss is getting quite brown now too. I did a 1g water change this morning and rinsed the floss. I'll rinse out the floss before leaving today and do another change tomorrow.

Any opinions on whether leaving the lights off for a few days will help? I presume its just going to mean the excess nutrients fueling the bloom will go somewhere else, so perhaps keeping things lit and continuing with the filtering and water changes is best?

 

[anbosu]

It may help, but really your tank is cycling and you have livestock in it, so you will likely be battling this for a few more weeks.

 

[tgunn]

It may help, but really your tank is cycling and you have livestock in it, so you will likely be battling this for a few more weeks.

Thanks for the input. I'll just keep up with the water changes and filtering for now and see how it goes.

I guess despite my best intentions I didn't do as good of cycling the tank as I thought. I waited almost a month after first setting it up; I did the fishless cycle, and used well established live rock, but despite it all I still seem to have issues. Oh well, such is life!

Tyler

 

[Mikez1207]

Get a skimmer. Run GAC and, or GFO. Even though you have a small tank a skimmer is best...i also have a 10G but I run a skimmer, GAC, GFO and macro algea...the smaller the system the harder it is for it to stay clean...trust me...but once you figure it out its cake walk

 

[tgunn]

Get a skimmer. Run GAC and, or GFO. Even though you have a small tank a skimmer is best...i also have a 10G but I run a skimmer, GAC, GFO and macro algea...the smaller the system the harder it is for it to stay clean...trust me...but once you figure it out its cake walk

Due to some poor planning on my part, the integrated sump area of my nano has enough room for the body of my Tunze Nano DOC skimmer, but NOT the cup. Unfortunately that makes it impossible to run the skimmer, short of rebuilding the tank.

I had hoped I could keep the water quality high by frequently stirring up the coarse substrate shallow sand bed, and through weekly water changes.
I'll have to run some GFO in the power filter and see if that helps too.

I've considered building an external algae turf scrubber to act as the primary filtration for this tank.

Ultimately aside from the 2 small fish I'll be keeping some rics, frogspawn, and other simple corals. This is definitely not going to be an SPS setup.

 

[Mikez1207]

You can try a HOB skimmer...i use the taam rio nano skimmer...love it...or you can try seachem purigen its like a skimmer and you can put it in your filter..a good clean up crew goes along way what lights are you using

 

[tgunn]

You can try a HOB skimmer...i use the taam rio nano skimmer...love it...or you can try seachem purigen its like a skimmer and you can put it in your filter..a good clean up crew goes along way what lights are you using

Hmm, I hadn't considered that; I'd need to modify my canopy to make room for a HOB skimmer. I'll have to think about this more and how to adapt for a skimmer. Is the Taam skimmer pretty silent?

I might have to revisit my Tunze Nano DOC; perhaps I could just build a more compact cup that will fit in the space I have.

I definitely need to get some more cleanup creatures. The live rock I bought has lots of 'pods and small creatures, but I haven't seen many bristles, spaghetti worms or mini stars crawling about.

I'm using 10 x 3w cree LEDs over my nano (4 cool white, 6 royal blue):

Space is tight inside the canopy after I added the splash shield for the LEDs, and associated air ducting to keep them cool.

But so far I'm loving the LEDs. The rics REALLY pop, and so does the green stamacora I have..

 

[Mikez1207]

Nice I wanted leds but for now I got some t5s...the skimmer is pretty quiet. And if you can rig up a smaller cup prob try that first....i know when I first added livestock my tank cycled again and I had same problem. Didnt last long though I just added new seagel from seachem....basicly carbon and pgosgaurd put together and really help...i also have macroalgea

 

[tgunn]

Small status update...

Small status update...

Here's where the tank is at now:

If it seems strangely empty, its because unfortunately my 2 fish bit the bucket. Everyone was fine and happy, eating well, until one day the dottyback decided to start mercilessly peck at the clown. I came back later in the evening with a little isolation box, but unfortunately the clown was done for at that point. Then, just the other week I messed up and forgot to plug my top off pump back in after a water change -- on a friday. I came back in to my pump sucking air and hardly flowing, the heater partially out of water (amazingly it still works -- guess the titanium heaters are worth it). Moral of the story is the temp got up to around 86F and stayed there, plus the salinity spiked. I got everything back up and running, but the stress unfortunately caused the dottyback to pack it in.

This goes to show you how a tank this small can be MAJORLY impacted by the smallest things. My old 140g could evaporate for a week with almost no impact to anything.

Through all this, the fuzz on the rocks is pretty consistent; about what I expect for a young tank. The water STILL goes murky and brown without the filter floss running.. Here's an example of what it pulls out:

Still reading stable parameters, so I dunno what it up there.

I have all the parts to make an external skimmer and algae turf scrubber; just need to pick up the acrylic. I figure I'll get to that in a couple weeks as I'm away on holidays in the near term. Since there's no fish in the tank its just a matter of keeping parameters basically in check for the few corals.

I'm thinking the skimmer and turf scrubber should be able to deal with this recurring brown bloom I'm seeing.

 

[India]

Why not introduce a few species of macro algae to get you through the cycle and fill out the tank a bit? as things settle down, you can see what you would like to keep in the display and phase out the rest as you add corals...or you can back it into a little refugium. But it will surely help for now...

 

[reef1906]

I have the same setup, I honestly would just be patient, you are ginna get this bloom and it will take some time to die off. The only difference between mine and yours is that I started with reef water from my Lfs and that helped tremendously as I'm not that patient either. I would run the power filter all the time, however I'm not familiar with filter floss and never used it. I used a marineland 150 with two cartridges and never had a problem. I also like to run my tank cooler around 77-78 degrees. That really helped a lot especially with algae blooms?

 

[tgunn]

Why not introduce a few species of macro algae to get you through the cycle and fill out the tank a bit? as things settle down, you can see what you would like to keep in the display and phase out the rest as you add corals...or you can back it into a little refugium. But it will surely help for now...

I have all the stuff bought to build a skimmer and ats; just need some acrylic. And time. .

But the macro is a good idea. Alternatively some Xenia would work too. I'll likely get a new fish in the fall

 

[tgunn]

I have the same setup, I honestly would just be patient, you are ginna get this bloom and it will take some time to die off. The only difference between mine and yours is that I started with reef water from my Lfs and that helped tremendously as I'm not that patient either. I would run the power filter all the time, however I'm not familiar with filter floss and never used it. I used a marineland 150 with two cartridges and never had a problem. I also like to run my tank cooler around 77-78 degrees. That really helped a lot especially with algae blooms?

The filter floss is no different than a foam block really. It does a good job and I can rinse out all the brown.

I realize it's likely going to pass but it has been a few months now. Meh gotta be patient I guess. Gotta get my coworkers to quit pestering me to add stuff too.