Red Carpet!!! Help

[Ziggy953]

I have a sea of red carpet like algae nearly coving my sand. What the heck? Water quality checks out temp is good everything seems to be happy but I have a ton of this stuff. What to do what to do? 75gal, been up and running for 7 months. Please help! It looks terrible!

 

[Fluff]

Sounds like cyanobacteria.
This may help...
http://www.aquariumadvice.com/article_view.php?fldAuto=48&faq=2

 

[Hara]

and water "checking out' is probably not as acurate as you think. You will have nitrates and most likely phosphates. That will fuel the cyano issue.

 

[roka64]

Hara is right, but the cyano may give low to no phosphate readings, since the cyano loves that stuff (IME, my phosphates were only reading around .1, nitrates were undetectable and my tank was covered in cyano). What kind of filter are you using? I just successfully wiped out my cyano. If you update your "my info" with your tank size/equipment/critters, that would be helpful.

water "checking out' is probably not as acurate as you think

Can you post test results?

That link that Fluff sent was helpful for me. I ended up doing a few other things.

 

[Ziggy953]

Sorry for not responding! I just spent the last couple of hours doing a large water change and sucking that red mess out of the tank. I am using a natural filter refugium with macro algae. I haven't cut it back in a while and I think that had a lot to do with this mess. I have also cleaned out my sump and refuge of excess matter. I use RO/DI water and have from the start so water is good. The article helped a lot! Thank you!

Update on Tank:

75 Gal sump with refuge (actually 2 refuge 10 and 20 gal) w/macro algae. 1 perc clown 1 blue devil damsel 1 yellow tail damsel 1 blue velvet damsel and one magenta dotty back. A double head of Frog spawn that is hosting the clown. 1 BTA that the clown ignores. several different types of zoanthids. An assortment of hermits and snails and a few brittle stars that just showed up. I have about 110lbs of live rock and something like 60 or 70 lbs of live sand. I got 80 but it was split between the refuges. I haven't added anything to the tank in over a month because of the lovely red carpet.

 

[roka64]

How long do you run your lights? What/how often are you feeding? Do you have any sponges/bioballs/wheel that could be producing nitrates?

 

[Ziggy953]

I had sponges until about an 2 hours ago. My lights are on timers and they run for 12 hours. Stagger on and off settings. I feed once a day. I think that the nitrates were coming from the large amount of detritis in the refuge. I haven't trimmed back the macro in a while and it was gross!!! I sucked all that I could out and cut the macro back. I think I'm going to switch to Chaeto, I'm using calupera now and the more I read the less I like the stuff. Any suggestions?

 

[seaham358]

Don't assume because you use ro/di water you parameters are fine. This is not the case.
Do you have test kits? Nitrate and phosphate test for and post numbers..
If you have cyno you have PO4 no two ways about it.
PO4 can blow by DI resin if its high enough or the resin is old.