I have been battling dino's for a long time now, just over a year. For the longest time I thought I was battling super brown cyano. I was doing all of the cyano things and was getting nowhere. It was getting very frustrating, I lost a lot of beautiful and huge SPS corals that I have had for years and quite a few fish to this awful stuff. It was very prolific and I was getting very, very discouraged. It seemed that all I was doing was siphoning it out, but it would come back really, really quickly. It would get so bad that I had to watch the overflows and make sure they didn't get so clogged with brown slimy gunk that the tank would overflow (this is the 500 gallon showtank).
Honestly, if I didn't have so much money invested into this tank, I may very well have quit the hobby over the summer. The only thing that kept me going was the knowledge that if I quit the hobby, my wife would kill me.
Finally about 2-3 weeks ago I ID'd the algae as dinos. The original plan was to try to get the pH up to 8.4-8.5 with 3 days of lights out, but it proved to be impossible to keep the pH that high for very long. So with more research I came up with my current battle plan.
Here is what I have been doing for the past 8 days:
3 days lights off
1 day lights on - 4 hours
3 days lights off
today is the eighth day and I am running the lights for 4 hours
Running carbon though a BRS reactor and changing it every other day.
Keeping a very close eye on the phosphate and changing the media (GFO) regularly, the GFO would become exhausted very, very quickly. Now it is lasting longer and I am getting it down to levels that I am accustomed to (under 0.04)
Running ozone at a rate of 100 mg/hr. I had an old in sump skimmer sitting around that I turned into an ozone reactor.
siphoning out all of the dino's that I could into a 5 gallon bucket through a filter sock and then replacing the water back into the tank.
running a filter sock on the drains from the overflow
dosing hydrogen peroxide at an estimated dose of 1 mL / 10 gallons - i.e. I am adding 50 mL of H2O2 daily. I missed one dose over the course of the 8 days due to being out of town and I was not going to have someone else dose hydrogen peroxide in my tank.
I am trying to keep the pH up but as I said, that is a losing battle and I have gone through a lot of kalk.
The results thus far in 8 days is nothing short of miraculous.
The dinos are not all gone but I have to actually look to find them.
I am starting to get my passion back for this hobby.
No ill effects on my live stock ether
