Starting out.....again

[doza]

Had an unfortunate incident a few months ago while i was away. Had a friend feeding my 55 gallon tank for the week and when I came back, everything was dead. According to him, my anemone died a couple of days after I left. I'm guessing it poisoned the water and killed everything else because nobody removed it?

Anyway......

After grieving for a while, I've decided to start again. From scratch. Since I already have most of the equipment, it won't be as expensive this time around. I have the following:

55 Gallon Glass Aquarium
2 50 Watt Heaters
2 Powerheads (200 GPH each)
1 Seaclone 100 Protein Skimmer
1 Tetratec PF300 Filter
4 CF (2 x 10000 and 2 actinic)

The last time I had a terrible problem with algae. I couldn't keep it down at all. I had 40 lbs of live sand and 45 lbs of live rock in the tank. I was thinking about adding more of each this time. Maybe that would help?

Is there anything else that I should consider adding to this setup that might help me out? I'd like to start keeping some corals in there at some point. I'm thinking that I would have to upgrade the powerheads but that the lights should be fine. Should I add a sump, refugium, or canister filter?

Thanks!

 

[MYTY1705]

were you using ro/di water? Do you have bio wheels on the filter? It probably was to much nutrients in the water causing the algea. More rock will help, if you can get to 80-90 lbs of rock you could loose the filter or use it for media like charcoal.

 

[doza]

no, i was just using regular tap water. i thought that might cause some issues since i didn't have this problem when the tank was in DC. only when i moved to ny.

wasn't using bio wheels on the filter. i actually had the filter media removed and was using it just for water movement.