refugium help please...

[cuckoochews]

So my fuge is a 15g long w/ miracle mud, lr, and chaeto. Light is provided by a hagen glo duel HO t5 w/ 6500k tubes. Critter wise, there was a bc shrimp, a pom pom crab, 5 red leg hermits, and 5 nassarius snails, as well as a ton of pods. About 2 months ago my green coris wrasse needed to take up residence in there due to incompatability issues in the dt. Since then it ate all the pods and my chaeto looks like hell. Its not as green and the macro has other algae growing on it! I assuming the pods used to keep it clean. Are there any clean-up critters out there that would pick at the chaeto to keep it healthy? :help:

[Cliff]

How much flow do you have going through the fug?

Cheato does best in higher flow areas. Lower flow would also allow for other aglae growth on your cheato

[cuckoochews]

Gph flow- not sure. The return pump is rated at 960 gph at 2 feet. It's probably more like 3 foot lift here though, plus I put a control valve on it back then because I felt it is was way to much flow for the small 15g... It's about half power now. But it had been set up like this for over 2 years and chaeto grew like mad and looked fantastic. I was pruning a basketball sized mass of macro every 2 months.

[Cliff]

Try manually cleaning that crud out of your cheato. I used to have cheato in one of my sumps and I hated it for that reason. It trapped all kinds of crud that I had to clean out as my CUC would not clean the cheato no matter what type of snail or crab I tried.

[cuckoochews]

That is what I've been doing the past few w/c's. I only wish the pods were still in there to whip it back into shape, ultimately I will need to get the wrasse outta there. The t5 is relatively new to the fuge (10 months), and I replaced the tubes at 6 mos. Can it possibly be the replacements are shot already? Never used t5 before, don't know how reliable the bulb duration is.

[Cliff]

I know T5 bulbs will last about 12 months for corals, can't see why they would not last about that long for cheato. My cheato grew best with 23 watt, 6500 or 6700K CLF bulbs on for about 12 to 18 hours on reverse lighting from the main tank.

[cuckoochews]

I'm on 12 hrs but no reverse from dt... Tank is in bedroom, couldn't deal w/ the light on all night. :hmm3grin2orange: