Argh, I can't stand it anymore!

[Karm40]

OK, 200 gallon tank
77 degrees
Ammonica 0
Nitrite 0
Nitrate 0
ph 8.29
tank has been up and running for 6 weeks. I had some cloudiness when the ammonia wasa at.25 and ran ozone for a few days to clear it up, which it did after 4 days.
All water perameters were perfect and I did a 20 percent water change and vacuumed some hair algae out of the tank.
Now tank has been milky for about 4 days. There is a slight green tinge to the water and skimmer has been pulling out some green junk. What is going on? Is there a single cell algae outbreak? I think I am going to shut the lights off for a few day.
What do you think?
Thanks!
Mark

 

[naesco]

Please buy yourself a couple of good books before you proceed. I and many others would highly recommend The Conscientious Marine Aquarist by Robert Fenner and Natural Reef Aquariums by John H. Tullock.
Do not even think of adding livestock until your tank matures (minimum four months)

 

[pathos]

if tank has only been running for six weeks, you can expect several more months of instability before it all balances out. be sure you are regularly changing out water using a RO/DI filter. What is your SG, Calc and Alk? How fine grained is your SB? lighting? i presume you have no corals or fish? so many factors, definitely take it slow and do your homework. your condition sounds fairly normal to me though, so don't worry... yet.

 

[scodz]

I kinda have extreme opinions but a tank that size should not be experiencing what you are talking about... was your original water tap water? unfiltered? are you still using unfiltered water? It sounds to me like your tank is a bit unbalanced right now. some quick fixes are
buy a diatom filter for under 100 bucks you could solve the cloudiness in a matter of hours.
I would recomend not using ozone at this point, it throws the balance try adding 3 or 4 air powered sponge filters to the sump they cost practically nothing like 10 bucks for ones that filter to 125 gallons, and two good air pumps could run em. The benefits would be two fold and excelent, higher oxygen saturation and added biologic/mechanical filtration. the filters are small and completey underrated remove em one at a time about a week apart if you try it. Any way the other option is to simply wait it out. in a tank that size it shouldn't be too long before you can add more fish but the longer the slower the better. Big tanks cycle totally differently than say 55-90 gallons, I bet it is a beautiful tank. congrats

 

[Laurie]

Karm - You don't mention live rock or live sand. Do you have good live rock in there? If you have sand was the bed disturbed causing the cloudy water? When I put the sand, rock, and water into my 200 it took a couple of weeks to clear up but not 6 weeks.

You might want to invest in a couple of power filters, load them up with some carbon and let them run for a while. I use 2 Aquaclear 500s on my 200 gal. In addition to giving me someplace to stick carbon when I need it, they provide excellent surface agitation (500 gph each), are quiet, and use very little electricity.

I don't know that I would necessarily wait 4 months to add your first fish but you should definitely wait until your tank has cleared up and stabilized. I would raise the temp to around 81-83 degrees, too. Old school used to say 77 but most folks keep their tanks in the low 80s now. These fish are coming from warm waters. Also, you don't mention you salinity - what is it? You should shoot for 1.025-26.

Good luck.

Laurie

 

[Karm40]

Thanks for all the advice. To answer some of the questions, I did start with tap water, but did put in Salifert phosphate remover and a silicate remover. There is 180 pounds of Fiji LR. No live sand yet, have a 3-4 inch layer of aragonite. G4 skimmer in sump. Pump is pushing about 2000 gallons an hour.
Calc 450
Alk 2.98
PO4 .03
Salinity 31
Spec. grav. 1.025
MG 1360
Lighting is 2 MH400 watt Advantage 10,000K

As far as books go, I have lots including the Sprung books and Conscientious Marine Aquarist and Natural Reef Aquariums plus all the expertise here!!!
Thanks,
Mark

 

[dsb1829]

<blockquote><font size="1" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">quote:</font><hr>Originally posted by naesco:
<strong>Please buy yourself a couple of good books before you proceed.
Do not even think of adding livestock until your tank matures (minimum four months)</strong><hr></blockquote>

Not very nice. Very presumptuous. Lacking in content to address the question at hand. Poor form Naesco

.

I have never heard of setting up a tank and then not stocking it with anything for 4 months. Most will agree that the tank should be stabilizing by 4-6 weeks depending on how you started it. Tap water is not the best thing to start with due to its high mineral content as well as high phosphate and nitrate levels. Okay, so what do you do to make up for a poor start??

I would recommend getting a few good size water changes in over the next few weeks. Nothing fixes itself overnight in this hobby, so patience is a necessity. By good size I mean 40-60%. The short period of time I recommend is to keep levels from building too much during that time. Also it is important to note that this is not to be done with tap water. Get RO or better yet RO/DI water to mix or natural sw to replace what you are removing. This is a dillution process to hopefully reduce the level of whatever is feeding the algae blooms you are having.

Since all levels are looking okay the bloom is completely processing the excess nutrients. This is both good and bad. Bad because micro algae blooms are so efficient at population growth they are hard to stop. Good because they are preventing the excess nutrients from damaging your current bacteria, pod, and worm populations.

A diatom filter could prove helpful to catch some of the algae from the water.

Best bet is to get on those water changes. Don't do any stocking until things stabilize and then do it slowly.

Hope that helps a bit.

 

[Anonymous]

Dougs got good points.

Water quality is key, because with a reef tank "Garbage in = Garbage out" holds doubly true. You should be taking definite action at this point to reduce you nutrient concentration--skimming and waterchanges with nothing but the finest water you can get.

You may be feeding the tank at this point (it's unstocked, but a weekly feeding would help your fauna build up). Some foods will cloud your water if you go a little overboard with it.

You can kill the lights and wrap the tank in blankets and stop feeding for a few days--I did that for 72 hrs on my tank and it really knocked the wind out of the dinoflaggelate problems I was having this summer (no problem for my corals either).

Lastly, live rock is porous. For that reason, you arent' going to win the algae battle overnight because nutrients will continue to leach out of it. Hang in there! Persistance will pay off for the person that examines and questions everything that goes into his tank.

Ty

Oh, on last thing--activated carbon may help. It will lose it's potency after 2-3 days, but it is very effective at removing organics. A small bag in the sump will do the trick.

[ January 09, 2002: Message edited by: tyoberg ]</p>

 

[Karm40]

Doug and Ty,
Thanks for the productive advice

It's really appreciated. I have been doing water changes with RO/DI water. Hopefully, that will help. And the lights are off. We'll see.
Mark

 

[Mouse]

Id start again with all RO/DI. Take the whole thing appart and clean everything as best i can with RO/DI. Im sorry to say but you may have caused yourself more problems than you can ever remidy in an ongoing fix. Heavy metals and so on could have been introduced. Either that or when you do finally get it to an inhabitable state let some macro's run wild for a month or two or three, hopefully they will absorb any nasties, then you can just rip em out. A Polyfiler may be usefull in that respect. One of those should remove all the impurities, over time of course. Run a poly filter for a month or two. good luck.

 

[Karm40]

OK, that's a little too radical for me! I'm doing some big water changes and things are looking better. There was some discussion about what exactly polyfilters and carbon actually remove. So, so far, I'm staying away from them until I know.
Thanks again,
Mark

 

[danmhippo]

When you are experiencing algae bloom, and your phosphate test kit are still registering .03 at such an early stage of tank setup doesn't sound good. I suspect two things, 1. your tap is high on phosphate, or, 2. Your LR is "curing", but in thr procdess, die-off's on the LR is causing the PO4 and NO3 build up.

What kind of Fiji LR you got? Both the cured and uncured LR you receive will have to be "cured" again in your tank. Just the "uncured" LR will take longer. During which die-offs of sponges and various other organism will continue and build up PO4 and NO3. Your NO3 test kit could registers at 0 when you are having a full blown algae bloom.

Keep doing WC with RO/DI water only. DO NOT use tap. It will be very economical for you in the long run to invest in a RO/DI kit for a tank this size and set it to auto top off your tank.

(BTW, the phosphate pads never really worked for me, I can get more result by doing WC than using the pads...)

HTH
Jimmy

 

[Xphixer2]

I would have to aggree with the point that Doug made about using a diatomic filter. (magnum 350 with diatomaceous earth (sp?))
{paper micron filter, not the poly filter.}

It is cheap, and proven effective for water polishing.

Rich

 

[Karm40]

The Fiji LR was uncured. I'm topping off with RO/DI and doing major water changes. The lights have been off for 4 days and the tank is much clearer. I'm just going to continue water changes and see how it goes. Maybe add some snails. I've been having trouble locating live sand. I have heard that since the holidays there weren't many shipments, but they are starting to come in.
Mark

 

[MedicineMan1]

<blockquote><font size="1" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">quote:</font><hr>Originally posted by Karm40:
<strong>The Fiji LR was uncured. Mark</strong><hr></blockquote>

And there is the answer to your problem.

 

[Derek]

Did you go through the live rock and dig out all of the dead sponges etc before putting it in the tank? I have gotten figi live rock which was riddled with big dead sponges and after a month I had to pull it out and manually remove the dead stuff. I thought about letting it cycle in the tank, but once I pulled it out I realized there was so much that I would have been fighting the nutrient battle for a long time.

If you can't pull the rock out I would suggest right before you do a water change put a hose on the output of a powerhead and power wash as much of the rock as you can. Try to hit the low flow areas where die off sits and leaches into the water column. Stick the hose into the holes in the rock to blow all of the junk out. Then do the water change.

Derek

 

[danmhippo]

And, don't worry about getting the "live sand" now, as your uncured LR should have already seeded the dead sand you put into the tank. I would bet that even if you don't add any LS, one month later from today, you will still see bristle worms and copepods.

 

[pez]

First, did you use chlorine or chloramine remover in your tap water? I sure hope so.

I also think your uncured LR is the source of your problems. You definatly want to leave the lights off, do frequent water changes, and use some carbon and phosphate remover during the curing process. However, with 0 ammonia and nitrite, I suspect the "curing" is over.

Add some snails and crabs to work on the algae, if you have not already.

-Tom

 

[Karm40]

Yep, I did use chlorine remover. There were some sponges that I removed from the rock. So far, I have only seen very small copepods on the glass. I haven't seen anything live on the rock. I've looked at nite with a flashlight. I have 60 crabs, 10 astreas and 2 red foots.
I figured some live sand couldn't hurt.
Mark

 

[Mouse]

If i was going to cure a tanks worth of LR i would probably want to do a 100% water change after the rocks had cured anyhow. And if you did it with RO/DI then your sorted. If you do decide to do this then keep a bucket of old tank water to rinse and or scrub some of the rocks before you put them back into the tank of new water. Bit of a chore but i like to go with big measures while i can. It sounds to me like all you have is a tank with now cured LR. If you do do a 100% change i would like to add a bactereal culture to it just to take the edge off.