BornToHula

Update time!

Dinos are still growing out of control... I've been dosing peroxide since the beginning of the month with no effect yet.  The UV light hasn't helped and nitrates are around 20ppm and phosphate is .04ppm.  I've also been replacing the carbon twice a week.  Siphoning out the dinos do help some, but if I take a couple days off it is right back to where it was. 

Realizing none of the above is a solution for my dinos I just got in my first order of phytoplankton and copepods in yesterday from Algae Barn.  I put the pods in the tank last night and I will be dosing 3oz a day of the phyto for the first week.  

Going forward I'm going to continue dosing peroxide and am going to try and get my nitrates down to around 5ppm though water changes.  UV light will continue to run as well.  

On to some good news, I got a few new additions I wanted to share!

I have 3 sunburst anthias and a golden midas blenny finished with quarantine. I plan on putting them in the tank by the weekend.  Once they get comfortable in the tank I am going to do a 3 day lights out to see if that will help with the dinos as well.

Bonded pair of small Crosshatch Triggers:

Kato's wrasse:

1 hour ago, FarmerTy said:

Well, you are laboring on Labor day!

Hopefully it's just a slow manageable leak.

Wasn't too bad, just removing my lights and canopy is pretty heavy/difficult.

I had mis-diagnosed the leak. I thought needed some more pipe thread sealant for the pipe that screwed into the bulkhead. Turned out the seal had gone bad on the bulkhead itself.  

Out of all the water that ended up on the floor, 99% was self caused. When I drained the overflow I had unknowingly left some water in the overflow.  There was  probably 2-3 gallons of water still in the overflow when I started removing the bulkhead... oops.

A leaking bulkhead is not the best way to start labor day. Note to self... never do an in-tank overflow again!

13 minutes ago, Isaac said:

my biocube's dinos finally went away after adding more fish and feeding more.  i think the trick is to out-compete the crap. what crap? 

now, its obviously not a cure-all, because just peroxide alone didnt help me.

I have some fish going through QT now so maybe adding them, dosing peroxide, and the elevated nitrate/phosphate will be the answer.

3 minutes ago, jolt said:

I theorize that's why the phyto seemed to help in my tank - outcompete the dinos, ehance biodiversity, and feed corals and pods at the same time

Where did you get your phyto from?  I was looking at algaebarn.com and it was going to cost a little more than I really wanted to pay to start dosing it. Not to mention it said to keep it refrigerated. 

1 minute ago, Isaac said:

have you re-tried peroxide while having elevated nitrate/phosphates?

I have not, but I just purchased some peroxide to start treating tonight.  I think I may bring down phosphate to around 0.1 ppm since it seems to be hurting the corals, but I will maintain nitrate where its at.

Still no progress on the dinos.  

What I have done so far:

• Installed 55W UV filter last week. Unfortunately, the UV filter doesn't seem to affect the dinos at all. 
• Raised nitrates and phosphates.   This week I've been at 25 ppm Nitrates and 0.15 - 0.19 ppm phosphates. This puts me at about 3.5 weeks of really elevated levels.  I think I may have done more damage than good in doing this, as previously healthy corals now have dead sections that the dinos are attaching onto.  There is ZERO other algae or cyano growing which is confusing me a bit.   When I did this a few months ago I had cyano, hair algae, and other stuff growing all over the place.  Not sure could be causing the difference now?
• I have been using a turkey baster and siphoning out what I can every other day. This does seem to help, but overall isn't winning the war.
• Changing carbon every 4 days.  The water is nice and clear, but I not effect on the dinos that I can tell. I went though my supply of carbon so I will probably stop doing this for now.

I haven't tried dosing pods because I already have a very large population of copepods and amphipods. 

I think the next step is to start peroxide dosing, or maybe try out some of the products on the market (Dino X or something similar).

I had been blowing them off with a turkey baster, but only siphoning every 5 days to a week.  I'll try doing that everyday as well.  Mine don't seem to clump up, but maybe that's because I haven't been turning off the powerheads when I do it.

Good idea on putting new carbon.

Wow! These dinos are ruthless.  I've lost two large acro colonies (ORA Chips and Toxic Green Acro) and a 4 smaller frags from them.  

Raising the nutrients even further hasn't helped with the dinos unfortunately.   Nitrates have been raised to between 10-15 ppm, phosphates .05 to .08 ppm since the 8th of August with no effect yet.

I ordered a 55 watt Jebao UV Sterilizer to see if that helps. Should be delivered today.  I know it probably isn't the best sterilizer, but it's about 1/10 the price of a comparable name brand unit. 

Loving the masterflex so far... can you tell when it went online?

I started dosing nitrates again last night.  Going to hold off on dosing phosphates for now.

Also got the masterflex hooked up and running tonight! 

Interesting... I had figured my nitrate and phosphate dropped while I was out of town, but it looks like they stayed constant (phosphate 0.02ppm, nitrate 5.0ppm).  I'm going to try and bump up both slightly, but I don't think I should push them too much higher.

18 minutes ago, FarmerTy said:

I kicked it a long time ago with hydrogen peroxide dosing.  Took about a month but I won the battle.  

Jimbo brings up another method to battling them, fighting dirty.  Increasing nutrients and not doing water changes and sometimes that'll knock them out too.

Since I just got done fighting chrysophytes dirty I guess I'll fight the dinos dirty too .  Any drawback in using both hydrogen peroxide and increasing the nutrients?

1 hour ago, jolt said:

I just kicked dynos in my frag tank a month or so ago.  What worked for me was making sure my phosphates were > 0.03 (checked every day), adding pods, and dosing phyto every night.  This coupled with two sessions of siphoning out everything with all pumps turned off, and also went ahead and replaced siphoned out water with fresh.  No lights out for me either.  Took about 4 weeks to kick and they've been gone since.  Not sure this is scientific, but my tank is looking great now ...

That is pretty much what I did to fight the chrysophytes.  I just stopped dosing nitrates and phosphates about a month ago, but sounds like it would be a good idea to start again. (Maybe I shouldn't have stopped.)

Am I ever going to catch a break with this tank? 

I was out of town this weekend and on my return I noticed I have dinoflagellates popping up in a few places.  I'm 90% sure its dinos this time and not chrysophytes.  This stuff is much more snot like and matches the pictures of dinos perfectly.  

Going to try and manually remove as much as I can.  I remember reading that hydrogen peroxide may help in removing it as well. Any tips?

1 hour ago, olaggie01 said:

The tip die off is interesting.  Is it only those couple of tips on those few acros?  If so, then to me it looks more like something is nipping at it than die off.  If it's water or nutrients, I would expect to see more die off and less PE.  The corals look healthy otherwise.  

What are you running your alk?

The tip die off was on about half of the acros. I saw the flesh dying off on some of the crorals and the die off happened all at once which is why I figured it was something wrong with the water.

But yes it was weird that the PE was still there even as they were melting.

2 hours ago, FarmerTy said:

I know you already spent the money on it but after running 4 different CaRX offer the years, the good ones kept the flow rate steady and didn't ever need a peristaltic pump and the bad ones did and I moved them along.  I can't remember which unit you have but if you for some reason got tired of dealing with a peristaltic pump, you can get a different brand CaRX that won't need the extra pump.

Since you are running it, not sure if you are running it on the effluent side to pull water through but that is the recommended setup versus pushing water into the calcium reactor.

I have an aquarium engineering CaRX.  I've talked to the owner bill and he gave a few things I could try to help solve the issue. I just happened to find a killer deal on the masterflex so went that route.

I have actually heard it is better to push the water through the reactor if it has co2 recirculation to prevent an air pocket from forming.  I don't really understand why it would make any difference?

9 hours ago, FarmerTy said:

Great video... And I appreciate the music!  You either have the smoothest hand motion ever or you used some kind of program to smooth it out?

 

You went Masterflex!  Nice!  Good thing you got the digital model too, those are much quieter than the regular model.

Thanks! I used the YouTube smoothing edit. Not sure if the iPhone does any smoothing automatically or not.

Yes, the master flex is a digital brushless model, it's pretty quiet!  The pump is going under the stand so sound was definitely a concern.

The tank is looking halfway decent, here is a quick video of it from a few days ago.

Also, I got fed up with constantly having to adjust my calcium reactor so I got one of these.  Hope to have it set up next week!

15 hours ago, Juiceman said:

Tested my water today after doing it for a week... nitrates are undetectable. 

 

so im doubling my dose and will test again next week. My alk dropped from 7.5 to 7.0 in one week and my CA dropped from 400 to 380... so I think that may say something about adding the nitrates... will test again next week and see!

 FYI, I just went though a nitrate (and phosphate) dosing schedule on my tank.  At the beginning I had to triple the dosage vs what the calculators online said to get any nitrate reading.  I would take the calculators with a large grain of salt and just increase dosage until you get a reading then adjust from there.

I didn't experience any change in alkalinity or calcium however.

5 hours ago, Gig 'em @ NDstructible said:

Did the burned tips correspond with increasing the nutrient levels?

I don't think so, the nutrients have been raised for about a month and a half.  The acro growth rate had actually increased quite a bit with the higher nutrients and the tips just started dying a few days ago.

The tips didn't get any worse yesterday, so hopefully the worst of it is over.

1 hour ago, FarmerTy said:

I forgot, you're fighting dirty against the chrysophytes. I was going to say, I could see higher phosphate levels causing STN in general on the acros, not just the tips but the bases too.

The good thing is that it has worked. 95% of the chrysophytes are gone and I think they will be gone completely in another week or two (fingers crossed).  

38 minutes ago, FarmerTy said:

Remind me of your nutrient removal regiment? Skimmer? Water changes? GFO? Carbon? Biopellets? Etc?

Right now I'm really only using a skimmer. I just put some granulated carbon online last night.  

I removed all my other nutrient removal due to the chrysophyte issue I was having.  Apparently chrysophytes thrive in a low nutrient environment, so I have been dosing stump remover and Seachem phosphorus to keep the Nitrates at 5ppm and phosphate between .05 and.02 ppm.  My feedings (6 cubes, & approx a teaspoon of pellets) were not enough to keep the nutrients up.

I do have Biopellets, GFO, and a 75g deep sand bed /refugium I can set up if or when they are needed. I also have cheato growing, but I only run every few days for right now.

These first two pics are some of the corals where the tips are dying. Kinda hard to see in these pics though. 

These are just some more pics because I hadn't posted any in awhile! 

15 hours ago, FarmerTy said:

I was going to say, nothing is a better cure to what ails any tank than water changes. Unless the source water is bad... Then you have a bigger issue.

Source water should be good, I just changed out RO membranes, upgraded to a dual stage DI and added a booster pump. I guess the actual source water from the city could have an issue, but I can't do anything about that so hopefully that's not the case.

I have a Triton test kit I'm going to send in to see if it shows anything.