Type of Algae?

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Tiffannburk

Aquarium Advice Newbie
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Jan 23, 2021
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Can anyone tell us what kind of algae we’re dealing with here?? Is it just green hair or something different? Or do we have more than one type going on with the purple coloring and stuff in the sand? We had brown algae covering the walls every few days for a month or two, and now our walls aren’t getting algae at ALL and this has kind of taken over.
 

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Hair algae. Telling you there is a nutrient problem in the water column. Manual removal along with large water changes with ro/di water until you can't detect your nitrate levels. Turning out the lights for longer periods of time will also starve the algae out, but when it dies will simply release the nutrients back into the water column and still require water changes.
 
Our nitrate levels are usually between 5-10ppm. They have been since we started our tank in May. Is that considered high?? We use RODI water and do water changes about once a week. Will the lighting cause that much?
 
Do you know your tds coming out of your rodi? When was the last time you changed membranes? Size tank? Stock? Lighting? Tank age? Frozen or dry food? Dosing anything?
Phosphate level? Any chemical media for phosphate control (e.g. phosguard, chemipure, gfo)?

You definitely have a nutrient issue. That’s a lot of gha and cyano. You are most likely getting a false reading due to the algae consuming nitrate and phosphate.
 
We have 0 TDS on our RODI, there’s 3 live rocks in a 75 gallon tank. We have 3 firefish, a Valentini puffer, a Midas Blenny, a pistol shrimp, and a watchman goby currently. The tank is 7 months old. We feed reef plankton and rotate through Midas and brine shrimp and occasionally put the seaweed strip on a clip in the tank. Our parameters have always matched up with our LFS, but we don’t have a test for phosphates, so that must be what it is. Only being in for 7 months, we’re fairly new to saltwater. My husband has continuously had a freshwater since he was a kid, and we decided to go one step further and are still learning. Guess we need to learn fast as we have a new 200 gallon that we want to establish as a saltwater too that we’re currently working on resealing.

So the purple is definitely cyano?? I was afraid of that. We will scrape rocks and boat and water change today and then blackout. What should we feed during the 3 day blackout?
 
Do you know your tds coming out of your rodi? When was the last time you changed membranes? Size tank? Stock? Lighting? Tank age? Frozen or dry food? Dosing anything?
Phosphate level? Any chemical media for phosphate control (e.g. phosguard, chemipure, gfo)?

You definitely have a nutrient issue. That’s a lot of gha and cyano. You are most likely getting a false reading due to the algae consuming nitrate and phosphate.

Ok, so we scrubbed the tank yesterday and it’s looking pretty good and after using the water we had on stock, we were running our RODI machine today and noticed that the TDS is at 1. Is that water going to be throw away water at this point or would it still be safe to use at that low? Also, we’ve replaced the resin filter once and even after less than 100 gallons, it’s already Amber again, so in addition to changing that again, is it recommended to change the Carbon and Sediment filters as well? The RODI is newer than the aquarium, for several months we were getting our water from our LFS and decided to start doing it on our own, so if there’s something we need to do differently on our end, any advice would be appreciated.
 
As it stands you need more rock and to get the TDS down to 0. When it comes to the filters in a ro/di unit, about 6 months is average-ish life span. But this can vary on the TDS going into the unit and if the PSI going through is close to 90 psi...and tbh I don't remember if it needs to be cool or luke warm to get best results, but that is picking peanuts out of poop at that point IMO.
Along with that, you need to get roughly 1 lbs per gallon of live rock in that system to sustain a large enough bacteria base to fuel the nitrate cycle.
 
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