Wtb

wtb

wtb

Mike,

Yeah. It almost seems like you need to camp on the site all day and get ready to pounce on things. Reef tanks and budget are an oxymoron. You say this hobby is "unforgiving." I agree. I'm afraid my battle with my cyanobacteria is tiring. Anyone have a suggestion or two? I refuse to use antibiotics. I'm doing the following:

1. dose polyox 30 drops twice a day

2. brush rockwork, corals, blow everything off with power head and vacuum 5 gallons twice a week.

3. pumping with an oceanrunner 3500 (900gph at 0 ft) through a scwd. Also have two small powerheads and a Catalina 1800 creating a little current.

4. decreased lighting cycle over main tank to 5 hours metal halide and 8 hour total supplementation using power compacts.

5. Increased photo period over my refugium to 24 hours.

6. regularly trim calurpa, chaeto, and clean skimmer.

7. replace carbon.

My next move is to get a much larger overflow and add another pump to my sump to increase flow across my macroalgae.

What else is there? This battle has been going for a month now. I won the battle with hair algae... What's next? Having fun but frustrated at this point.

Steve
 
Your problem with Cyano sounds like what I dealt with for months 3-7 of my tank. I tried a lot of things but it finally cleared up when I went to lighting my refugium 24 hours, letting a lot of Chaeto develop before I trimmed any, and going to 4 very tiny feedings a day.

I switched to an automatic feeder and set it to meter out as little as possible each feeding - I still had to block the opening with a piece of paper to get the amount of food dispensed down to where I wanted it.

Hope that helps.

Tom
 
Hey thanks Tom. I'm going to buy an auto feeder. I feed the little spectrum pellets. I had an auto feeder but dropped it in the water. I trimmed my chaeto yesterday because it had cyano stuck to it. I also rinsed it in city water and more than likely killed a bunch of pods. I don't give up easily. Anyone else have a suggestion? Thanks Tom.
 
I used to get cyano on my macro in the fuge. Whenever I did a water change I would take the macro out a handfull at a time and shake it off in the bucket of old water. It seemed to help for a little while but I think getting the flow up was the thing that actually kicked it. Your macro will do well for a few weeks or even months on 24hr light cycle but eventually it will stop growing and start to wither without any dark time. At least that's what happened in my system.
Hope that helps.
 
Itzme makes a good point about the macro not thriving for long under 24 hr light. Now that I think of it, when I last looked at my tank (3 weeks ago) the macro did appear to not be thriving as much as it had. I will be going home this weekend - maybe I'll put it on a timer.
 
macro on timer

macro on timer

Thanks. What would you say would be the best light/dark photoperiod to use? I have a mixture of calurpa and chaeto in the same fuge about the size of a soccer ball.
 
Re: macro on timer

Re: macro on timer

<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=8517724#post8517724 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by stevestank
Thanks. What would you say would be the best light/dark photoperiod to use? I have a mixture of calurpa and chaeto in the same fuge about the size of a soccer ball.

I would never say that my methods are the best but I would say they are working for me and you can adopt them. I hope they work for you also but that's the weird part about this hobby, one person can follow the same regimen and have tons of problems.

I run mine on a reverse cycle to help steady the PH. My fuge lights come on about an hour before the display's lights go out and they go off about the same time as the display's lights starting back up. I run the display on a 12 hr cycle so the fuge gets roughly 13-14 hrs lighting daily. I like to let the macro "wake up" and start doing some photosynthesis before the main lights go off to help keep the PH up overnight. That's the reason for the 1 hr overlap in lighting.

HTH
 
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