Should I scrap it and start over?

[mv123]

Hi all,

I have a 2 year old tank that is loosing a battle to algae and aiptasia, and I am considering starting over. Any thoughts or advice are welcome. I previously had a 28 gallon SPS tank for 8 years, so I have decent experience in the hobby, but this newer tank has been a frustrating problem and I am not sure what is best to do next. A few pics of the tank are attached.

The tank is a 90 gallon Elos, with sump. Filtration is mainly an Elos skimmer, a carbon and GFO reactor, and "real reef" rock. Current inhabitants are only a leopard wrasse, rose bubble tip anemone, and sunk clownfish. I had a yellow tang who recently died, unfortunately.

Ammonia, Nitrate, Nitrite all 0. Calcium and Magnesium are in line, not that it matters a whole lot as I have no real hard corals.

The biggest problem is that I cannot get algae and aiptasia under control. I know they are related, nutrient problems can exacerbate both. I have cut back on feeding so much that I worry my tang died due to not getting enough to eat. I feed Ocean Nutrition Flake, once a day or every other day. Cleanup crew is an assortment of snails, blue leg hermits, and 2 emerald crabs. They make a dent from time to time in the algae, but it still covers the rocks.

I have a couple of main concerns that are leading me to think about starting over: First, is my dissatisfaction with http://realreefrock.com/. I put this in my tank on the advice of the folks at the Elos store where I bought my tank, instead of using live rock as I had in the past. I am not sure this stuff is really acting as biological filtration as much as it should. I liked how it looked at first, and does look more natural now once as it has grown real coralline, but I worry it is just dense, not doing the live rock job of hosting denitrifying bacteria.

Second is my substrate. I started with a very fine grained aragonite, but this kept being a problem as my MP40 was stirring it up quite a bit. So I later (about a year ago) took some out and added in some larger grained aragonite. I am not sure that the substrate is doing much other than being a trap for nutrients at this point. I do not have any real sand stirrers other than a couple of snails.

Finally is the aiptasia. I have tried for a year to control them, but they keep coming back in waves. There are far too many now for aiptasiaX or other manual solutions to work. I have not been able to find a fish that would eat them (the last copperband I tried ignored them). I have heard that Berghia nudibranchs can do the trick, but i cannot seem to find any locally in NYC or NJ.

So, does it make sense to just scrap it and start over with a clean slate, new substrate and new actual live rock? I hate to go through the initial 6 month period again, but at this point I am really discouraged with the tank. If not, does anyone have a suggestion or two as to how I can get this thing back on track? I would love to get back to a place where I can start adding some corals and fish to make this the tank I want it to be.

Thanks for your help!

 

[figuerres]

do you have a way to remove the fish and coral to a different tank and still keep this tank running ?
if yes then I would do that first.
then get some peppermint shrimp to put in the tank and do a few other things.
algae needs nutrients to grow, check the source of change water and make sure you do not have silicates and or phosphates in the new change water.
if the water and the salt are good then do a number of water changes and check that the lights are ok, some times old cf tubes for example change as they age to also favor growth of algae.
get the food out of the system and let the shrimp work on the anemones. if they can't find other stuff to eat they will do it.
use the manual treatment only on large ones, let the shrimp get the small ones.

 

[Sk8r]

I'm wondering about your light ---when you went to a larger tank.

Pep shrimp do work: hard to get a good team at first, but once they start eating them, that will finish that.

I'd recommend a Phosphate and Nitrate test (Salifert) to see exactly where you are. If you find your phosphates are up, run GFO, and if nitrate has become an issue, you might investigate vinegar dosing to see if that can knock it back.

Light issues of adequacy when bringing equipment to a newer tank can cause real ghosty problems, failure to thrive, etc. And that denser sandbed might also have set up some nitrate issues, just trying to think of weird possibilities worth checking. Aiptasia are just taking advantage of food availability, but shrimp can get them.

 

[stingeragent]

Are you using ro/di water? Just judging by the huge amount of algae on the glass I'd say you have a nutrient problem. I can't see the rock being an issue as far as bacteria go if your ammonia and everything else is at 0. Is there a sump on the tank? How much lighting does it get? How often do you do water changes? I just basically re-did my tank. I had a huge battle with bubble algae and just overall neglect. Moved it to a new room in the house, re scaped it, etc. It was a tank I upgraded to back in march. I had fairly high flow in the tank as well as a sump and skimmer, and during the tear down I found I had hugeeeeeee amounts of "gunk" in the sand. Heres what I did. I setup a temporary tank and also a temporary tub. I took out 5 gallons of water and filled the temp tank with that and 5 gallons of new water. Did the same for the tub. Caught all my fish and moved them to the temp tank along with some of my corals. Moved the rest of the rock to the tub. As I was pulling it out of the existing tank, I scrubbed off all the buble algae I could see on every inch of the rock. A couple pieces were so bad I just tossed them. Then I siphoned the rest of the water out and left the sand bed. Moved everything to its new spot and filled the display tank half full of new water. I then put in 4 powerheads pointing at the sand and stuck on 3 HOB filters with carbon/ quilt batting. I let that run until the water was crystal clear. All the gunk in the sand bed caused a mini cycle but in a few days it was good. Ammonia back to 0. I then moved over the tub to the DT, and then the next day moved the fish and the rest of the temp tank over. Also made sure during all of it, to completely clean the glass on all sides in the DT. Any floating algae, etc, I netted out. On the tank move I'm not using the sump anymore. I decided to use a canister filter instead. With my sump / skimmer, and high flow, after seeing all that crap still in the sand despite doing it the proper way, i'm gonna go old school with it. Not in the biological aspect, but all the filter floss in that canister is gonna collect the detritus as opposed to it infesting my sand bed again.

Back to your tank though, if you are using RO/DI water when was the last time you checked the filters and resin? I live in a house built in the 50's with old plumbing. I have to change out my resin every 3 months when it's supposed to last 6.

 

[Lucky Lefty]

Absolutely fish in Clifton has berghia nudibranches. I was there this week and they only had 3, but they were available for order. They were $20 a piece though amd you would need at least 10 to start a good colony that will reproduce to numbers large enough to keep aiptasia under control.
I did find a very healthy cbb in one of there tanks that was actively hunting and ate frozen mysis when the guy dropped some in. Needless to say I picked him up. I awoke today to find 5 aiptasia gone off one rock and another near by half eaten.
Maybe try to hunt for a healthy cbb. They had 3 others there in different tanks. The other 3 were swimming aimlessly, stressed and not eating.

With the algae problem, I don't think I read about you export solutions. What type of skimmer are you running. With a tang and a few others in a 90, I'd imagine your bio load is pretty high. Get a good skimmer on that thing, do manually removal once a week with water changes, and it should start turning around in a few weeks.

Where are you located. I'm near the jersey shore. Feel free to pm me, I wouldnt mind lending a hand to try and save your tank. I know how it feels to be disappointed with your tank, and that's not what this hobby is about.
Let's get that thing humming man!

 

[Mark9]

I'd do a restart.
Clear the tank, clean it.
Get the rock and sand you want.
Spend the time to cure the rock before putting it in, spend some time on aquascape.
Use ro/di from the beginning, ensure 0 tds.
Make sure you have an adequate skimmer.
Don't overstock with fish.
In 2 months you can have a clean tank with the corals you want.
Battling your issues truly suck, wouldn't wish it on anyone.

 

[mv123]

Thanks all for the advice. A few more details:

Today I did water testing before a 15G water change
Ammonia, Nitrite 0. Nitrate 0.5 (almost 0). Phosphate 0.11 (Hana checker). Ph 7.9. Alk 7.5. Calcium 400

Lighting on the tank is an Elos Aquatop LED. 2 strips, one white, one blue, 9 LEDs each. These are Cree XP LEDs. I had been running them at 65% power on blue, 60% on white. Today I turned them down to 45% each, which should still be plenty for the anemone. 10 hour duration.

I use RO/DI for water changes. <10 ppm on it now, I refreshed it a few months ago. Before that it had crept up to over 50, so for awhile water was not the best.

I had been dosing Vinegar in the past but stopped (out of laziness honestly). I will start this up again, with a slow ramp up.

I think my plan is to try this in a few phases.

For September:
--I will increase water changes to 15 gallons each on Sat and Sun, so effectively 2 15% water changes a week.
--Start vinegar dosing again.
--Pick up some berghia nudibranchs and peppermint shrimp. Thanks for the tip on Absolutely Fish, I will call them today. How many peppermints should I try?
--Add some more snails for cleanup crew. I also will add a serpent starfish (and hope my wrasse does not get eaten while he is sleeping)
--See if I can find a health copperband. I will quarantine it for a couple weeks before putting it in the main tank.
--Treat bigger aiptasia manually, hope the others can be controlled by the bio solution
--Hopefully this makes a dent in the algae aiptasia

If I am not seeing much progress in the month then for October:
--take out fish, bubble coral, anemone.
--Clean rocks by hand
--Turn lights off for a couple weeks
--Try the powerhead at sandbed idea to stir it up and let the filter work (adding a HOB with floss might help)

If this clears stuff up great, put fish back in, slowly start up again
If not, start over from scratch.

Any other suggestions or ideas?
(Lucky Lefty, I am in Millburn, thanks for the offer. I may take you up on it if I need to do the total restart!)

 

[Lucky Lefty]

no problem I'd be happy to help whether you restart or not. millburn is a little bit of a hike for me as I am in toms river but I absolutely love going to the elos store on millburn ave so coming up to help you out would be a great excuse to go to elos.

The only thing I still didn't notice in your details is a protein skimmer. Sorry if I missed it, but this may be a piece of equipment that helps substantially with nutrient export and your algae problem.

 

[mv123]

Skimmer is an Elos PS1000. Decent size and works well, I do get at least a cupful of gunk a week out of it, depending on how I set it.

 

[stingeragent]

Any update on your plan? If your corals are limited to a few and only a few fish, have you thought about doing a temp tank transfer and just going lights out on the DT? If you were to do that you could run some HOB filter's, scrub the crap out of the tank,and stuff as many powerheads as you can fit in there.