So my setup is 3 months old and now every time the lights come on the ugly starts. I have held off on coral because of this so lights are off for now. Do I leave them off and just continue to wait it out or fire them up and close my eyes and let it go? Do I get some pods or add a different bacteria culture? What’s your thoughts? Nitrate is 11.1 and phosphate is .19. Doing 15% water changes twice a week. Feeding 4 small fish in 32 gallons of water twice a day. 9 snails and a blood red fire shrimp all doing well.
Fish don’t require light like corals and others in the photosynthetic group.
It’s still just a bit early in the systems maturity, those things, the good algae and bacteria’s have not developed in sufficient populations to keep our rocks clean and sand white.
I’m ok with your nitrate and phosphate at this time provided neither are rising or falling week over week.
Until you get to that point, you need to help, take out as much as you can consistently.
Speed maturity by keeping salinity, Alk and temp pinned, with the least flux as possible, day in day out.
A splash of live phyto weekly will help feed.
If you keep that up, the good stuff likes that and increases its population.
There comes a point that the good guys outcompete that crap your pulling out, and it just disappears over 4-5 days.
It will stay that way until your chemistry gets out of whack, so be sure to keep watch.
I’d do a min photoperiod say 7 hours at lowest setting until good guys arrive, provided you have no photosynthetic friends in your system.
