Daily algae battle from the sun

[emm0909]

Dalee26 - you can make an ATO for very cheap. All you need is a mechanical float and a bracket for it. Swing by TRS and Tom will give you a nice one for $15. Make a little bracket out of acrylic and just silicone it to your sump. Really not that bad.

Look for the thread called Baffles - over under OR under over

I'm I'm diligent enough I will have pictures of my new sump with the ATO hooked up.

 

[disaster999]

good luck with your hair algae problem. i hope its not from my rocks when i sold you my system. ive tried almost everything and nothing eats them.

also, im not sure if different part of town have any different TDS readings, but when i was in rochester, my TDS was around 400. hong kong has a tds of 50.

 

[dreaminmel]

Different parts do have different readings for sure. We used to live Webster with a TDS of 480 and now we live literally 5 minutes down Empire Blvd in Irondequoit and the TDS here is 278. My 72g bowfront tank crashed fall 2006 when I was using the Webster tap water. I let the tank sit in darkness for months, bought my current RO system and started back up. I have not regretted the RO system once in the past three years.

Now I did have a reef tank in Henrietta and also in Bloomfield using tap water the whole time without issue but I didn't own a TDS meter back then and couldn't say what the readings were. The tanks I had then only contained fish and easy coral though. My acro obsession didn't start until later.

Whatever you do emm0909, don't waste your's or mom's money on the the Tap Water Filter that Drs F&S sells... I went through so many replacement cartridges for that thing it wasn't funny. I could've bought two or three RO filtration setups for the same amount of money.

Also, even those of us that use RO/DI units deal with different types of algae so it's not a cure-all. In your situation I'd attempt multiple water changes and possibly running GFO in a filter of some type. Without fail, anytime I've got algae issues I've also got nitrate and phosphate in the tank. Even low levels of those can feed some of the most irritating algae.