battling Cyanobacteria

[dustbust_1]

I have Cyanobacteria in my tank I think. My aquarium is 3 month old 20 gal long with an underdeveloped cleaning crew (help is on the way). I have 0 nitrites and 0 nitrates. I originally filled my tank with tap did the live sand/rock cycle for a month till perameters were good, topped off with RO, added a cleanup crew, 1 week later added a damsel (1in) waited 2 weeks and added a pair of clowns (1 in each) everything was good for about a 2months then wham this dark crap was all over my sand bed. How do you get rid of this stuff

 

[an411]

its normal in a tank that old. I have battled it myself and the best way to get rid of it was by keeping the lights off for a few days I did 3 days. More frequent water changes and try to get some of it out manually. Just cause you nitrates and phosphates are undetectable doesnt mean that they are not present in the tank but that the algae is sucking them up. HTH

 

[HappySkittles]

what i have read
(but people with experience would be better help >_<)

higher flow (low flow helps it grow)
less light (lessen the amount of time your lights are on)
less food (extra nutrients help it grow)

also siphon whatever you can out so it doesnt go all over the place anymore

 

[dustbust_1]

does this sound like a good theory?
I added red gracellia algea to my refugium. I did the mistake of buying before researching. What I bought from petco was dead or dying algae (handful of the stuff) over the past week it pretty much disinigrated - releasing its stored nutrients into the water where the cyno sucked it up spreading over my tank making my nitrates appear 0. Water changes are my main means of fixing the problem

 

[Tswifty]

I just finished the "lights out" method to battle it, but I only did 2 days. We'll see how well it maintains though over the next week or so. Today was the first day that the lighting resumed. Here's the before and after shots:

Before:

After:

Before:

After:

Before:

After:

 

[dustbust_1]

wow, so far that looks awesome. How are your corals?

 

[crvz]

great recovery, tswifty. keep us posted over the next number of weeks, I'm curious to see how effective it will be long term.

 

[mxmarks]

Woah! Whats your clean up crew like?

Because Ive tried lights out, and while it worked a little, it was nothing like that, and I ended up with a ton of dead algae and cyano. Did you manually clean that after?

My problem now is that I have a ton of dead brown algae everywhere...