algea!! must go HELP!!

[esco]

hey guys ... i have a 30 gallon saltwater reef tank .no corals yet but about 30 lbs of live rock.. great protien skimmer and a phosphate reactor hooked up to my sump/refuguim. now i had left for the week end to return to a tank full of algea...left someone in charge of cuttin the lights on and off..but something must have gone wrong ...either way i have lots of algea all around my tank im doin a water change (15g)at the momment..i scrubbed the glass and brushed the rock offs.....2 hours later more algea appeared on top of the sand ...what else is ther to do? uv stirlizer? what brand?

 

[reefman]

your new tank is going thru a cycle, probably the rocks aren't fully cured. thats y so much algea. keep doing maintenence. after a few weeks, it should get better. then get some clean up crew(snails, hermits,etc..) just make sure the skimmer is working n good water flow.

 

[esco]

algea...

thanx im doin a water change bout every 2 weeks....

 

[mr_X]

first of all, you don't need lights on if you don't have any corals. shut them off, then do some waterchanges with good source water like R.O.D.I, to remove whatever nutrient the algae is feeding off of.

as stated above, you are going to go through alot of ugly stages in the beginning while your tank is cycling, and then stabilizing.

i don't put stock in cleanup crews. my thought is that more eating, pooping critters aren't going to help the problem of excess nutrients (the algae being the symptom).

clean water, void of food for algae to thrive on, is what makes algae disappear.

 

[anthony27]

you are new right?

 

[sambo]

I would invest in some test kits to monitor your water parameters. Do water changes often and try to keep you nitrates down around 10-20ppm and phosphates as low as possible. nitrate, phosphate, alkalinity, calcium and magnesium are the important kits to get. Try to get a pH probe of some kind that is pretty important to monitor how stable the tank is and much more convenient than a test kit. Also, use a refractometer and not a hydrometer to keep your salinity up around 1.025. I'd forget the UV sterilizer, i think your money would be better spent elsewhere (like on test kits or books), and it certainly wouldn't help your algae problems unless its green water you're having issues with. HTH

 

[anthony27]

when did you set the tank up?

 

[esco]

thanx guys , im not that new to the site i never log in .. i recently logged back in reason is i upgraded my nano to a 30 gallon. and a friend donated lots of his saltwater item to me ..i had my live rock running for over 2 year in my smaller nano and things where running great ..now i want to add more corals to my tank , but i started to notcie lots of algea..im using ro water and all lighting is good and my filter running great ...so im just steppin the hobby up and wated to use the correct items..i see most of the test kits on line wated to kno which ones to get ?

 

[albano]

...left someone in charge of cuttin the lights on and off..

Sounds like a $5 light timer, would have saved alot of aggrevation! :splitspin

 

[sambo]

true that.

I like salifert test kits for PO4, magnesium and alkalinity. API for calcium and nitrate (these are cheaper) get as many opinions as you can. Some test kits are thought to be much more accurate than others and some can be very confusing.

 

[esco]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wK0Kjp4xo7U

 

[esco]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wK0Kjp4xo7U

 

[basiab]

If you don't have any fish in the tank and it is cycled and you have lots of algae then you are not telling us something. Algae needs nutrients to grow not just light.

 

[sambo]

Not necessarily true. Many ULNS tanks that are dosed with vodka or zeovit etc still grow algae despite having undetectable levels of nutrients. Also, the algae could be trapping most of the nutrients.