Massive HA problem so im cooking the rock

B

boy2k

New member
Lo guys
ok better start with some backgrond...

I started my tank about 8 months ago with rock i got from someone elses established tank. When i went to pick the rock up it was obvious that the tank had been left in a state for quite a while and all the rock was polluted with Hair algea. I got the rock home (over 50kg!! more like 65 i would guess)
and scrubbed it all in ASW (RO water) and placed it all in my tank.


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the rock came with a leather coral, an anenome, a tomato clown, a bristle star and a sand sifting star which are all doing fine.

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i had a problem with p04 scince adding the rock so i converted my fluidised sand filter to a p04 reactor and scince then the water was showing as below 0.01 p04 for the tank and 0 from the reactor output.

The hair algea returned though.. and nothing i have been able to do so far as been able to get rid of it.. 0 nitrates 0 nitrite 0 amonia near 0 p04...


I went away for just over 2 weeks on holiday (my friends fed the fish in my absence) and came home to this....
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i havent put anything else in the tank scince i got the rock because i have been fighting this ever scince. i just want to get it under control so i can start enjoying my tank and populating it.

So after a ton of research it seems that due to the previous owners lack of upkeep the rock seems to be saturated with p04 and blocked with detrus.

So enough is enough! i pulled out 90% of the rock this weeked and scrubbed it in ASW and have now placed it all in a plastic bin with a powerhead and the lid on.. i will track my progress on this thread for anyone else who is having these problems.

Lets hope i can beat it :(
 
Good luck cooking the rock will help but if there are other issues with your setup or water the problem will never go away.
 
i agree with mike cooking the rock is a waste of time, figure out what the excess nutrient is and remove it, or it's just going to grow back
 
cheers for the replys guys.
As far as i can tell its the rock to blame and the excess nutrients are locked inside it. I have left a few of the unaffected rocks in the tank so i can monitor them and the water and will post my progress on that as well as the cooking. Everything seems great param wise at the moment in the tank.
 
A couple comments:

1) be sure to do lots of aggressive water changes, both in the tank and in the vat with the live rock. Otherwise, phosphate in the rocks/substrate is just going to stay in the water column and prevent any more from leaving the sites where it may be stored.

2) It doesn't seem you have any herbivores in the tank (maybe I missed something in the description...I read it kinda quickly). That - and having friends overfeed (I'm guessing) the tank for two weeks - is going to very strongly encourage algal growth. Adding a healthy population of herbivores is going to go a long way towards control (and also helps remove phosphate by metabolism and later removal of their waste via filtration). Algae are a natural part of the reef and thrive on generally the same things as corals (light, heat, and nutrients); the only thing keeping them from taking over in nature is the huge degree of competition from other organisms and their removal by herbivores. In my opinion, this is a dynamic we need to recreate in the reef aquarium, with lots of corals and strong pressure from herbivores...just my personal opinion, but that strategy works well for me.

3) Directly pulling any algae out of a tank is going to help alot, too...algae store up nutrients in their biomass as they grow, and removal also removes those same nutrients. You're probably/almost certainly right about phosphate being bound up in the calcareous substrates, but with no source of removal from the aquarium (such as the phosphate reactor), it'll never be pulled out of the system. Obviously, more aggressive removal speeds that process along.

4) I'm sure you know this, but it bears repetition: limit feeding. Even if you're removing phosphate pretty well, levels won't go anywhere if you're also adding it back in.

Hope that's helpful and not just beating a dead horse, and best of luck...I know from experience that controlling hair algae is problematic.

~A. ocellaris
 
VacavilleFC3S said:
i agree with mike cooking the rock is a waste of time, figure out what the excess nutrient is and remove it, or it's just going to grow back
Click to expand...

Whoooa. :)
"Cooking" rock is not a waste of time.
It is, IMO, one of the four best things you can do for water quality.
 
cheers for the replys guys.

@Amphiprionocellaris
i have a sea cucumber in there and a clean up crew of about 20 snails and 10 hermits but the snails have been dieing off and i havent seen the cucumber for a while..
The phosphate level went up to 2 when the rock went in so i converted a fluidized sand filter i wasnt using to be a phosphate reactor which bought it down to 0.01. i have been trying to pull all the algea i had off the rocks but it was growing back super fast so thats why i am now cooking it. I was also feeding every 2-3 days but im sure there was some overfeeding in my absence which is why it bloomed so quickly. I have been fighting this scince the rock was introduced tho and like i said it came from a tank that was like a jungle...

The rock has been in the vat for a week now so i will be dunking/swishing this weekend.
 
you might have more phosphate than you are finding on the test. That algae is consuming it before you can read it.

And Sean, I am curious how cooking your rock is good for water quality. Maybe i'm missing something.
 
I would cook every single piece of rock. Dont risk it. There will be hair algae on the rock you leave in the tank. If you go through the trouble of cooking the rock, make sure its all cooked. Do massive water changes, run gfo, use ro/do water, and see what happens.
 
Met3112 said:
you might have more phosphate than you are finding on the test. That algae is consuming it before you can read it.

And Sean, I am curious how cooking your rock is good for water quality. Maybe i'm missing something.
Click to expand...


Just in case cooking does not mean cooking as in eating rather it is a cleaning process to remove bound PO4 and detritus build up in the rock. If you knew this sorry but some have tried to boil their rock and then cannot understand why everything is dead.

Take a power head to your rock and see what comes off. If a little great if not not so much. Over time the rock becomes clogged and bacteria can no longer live in the rock.

By cooking the rock it is becoming clean through the washing and then sitting in the dark for a period of time. The unwanted algae will die and through WC it and the addition nutrients will be removed.

If the rock is really bad it will shed and a detritus layer will form on the bottom of your tank or bucket.

It does take time but it is effective.
 
This worked for me. Algae fix marine, bio-pellets, prodibio and biotim, mexican turbo snails, pulling a lot of HA out every day with water change.
 
I would highly recommend two or three large mexican turbo snails in that tub. Get the biggest ones you can find. They'll clean up what you can't scrub off. You may also want one or two in the display. They are the only indiscriminate eaters of hair algae I've found.

You don't want too many because if they don't have enough to eat they'll starve and the decaying bodies will just return the waste to your tank.

Good Luck ...........
 
Well 90% of the rock has had a week in the vat so this weekend is swish and water change for that lot. If I'm going to cook the last few pieces I need to figure out how to remove the anenome and leather from it.. Any suggestions? Don't wanna harm them.
 
marine algae fix along with raising your mag level with kent tech M will help but please understand that that amount of HA is growing for a reason . there is way to much fuel for it and that would be organic waste po4 or silicate IMO . you need to reduce all of thease things before you will ever get that under control .
please explain what kind of filtration that you have and your stocking along with what and how much your feeding . ro/di and tds ,filter sock ,skimmer,gfo,carbon,uv,reactors,lighting and age of bulbs will help up determine what the cause is here but just cooking the rock will not prevent from this from happening again .
remember you need to remove the cause or its just gonna happen again .
 
it is really controversial, but I actually had a lot of luck with an algae scrubber. Gives the algae a place to grow that is not in your tank, and makes it easy to "harvest" the algae for gradual phosphate & nutrient removal. You can also turn off your tank lights for 2-3 days at a time once or twice a month as well. I had really bad HA + slime + dinos for several months, but now there isn't a trace of anything (except recently a problem with some over-energetic macro-algae)
 
manual removal and a week dark out with stopping feeding and then a fuge. My problem was that bad in may and now its pretty much all gone. DOn't hit the rest button on an established reef just work better
 
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