AllenIsbell's Marine Aquarium Experience

[AllenIsbell]

Pure ammonia would certainly be a lot better as you won't be adding any additional nitrates and phosphates into the system that way. If that happens, the nitrates and phosphates will get soaked into your rocks and leach out back into the water over time. These types of situations can lead to long term algae battles which are not fun.

Notated, Cliff. Thanks for the educational posts. I learn at least one thing new from you every single day, it seems!

I have more of the lime green algae. It doesn't look hairy or anything. Here are a couple of pictures:





I will be testing for nitrites and nitrates tonight. I don't have any ammonia tests, yet. :/

[Cliff]

Sorry if I missed this info already

Did you add any live rock or ammonia to the tank ?

Did you use tap water or RO water to start the tank ?

You can always just shut off the lights and keep them off while cycling.

[AllenIsbell]

The rock was dry. The water is tap that I filtered through our Pur filter and used water dechlorinator to remove chlorine and cloromine.

I know, I know. it's not RO/DI, because I didn't want to pay for 20 gallons of water. Cheap, yes. I will eventually get a RO/DI unit. Hopefully very soon. I will be doing ALL of my water changes and top offs with RO water from the grocery store. I'm sure I have some phosphates or something similar in there that are promoting such growth.

The only reason I went ahead and used tap water was because I have read in different places and heard in different Youtube videos that some people use tap water with no issues at all--even in reefs, so I figured I'd try it. The guy in this particular video that I'm thinking about was the owner of an LFS and he was the one saying that RO/DI water isn't a must.

Oh, no ammonia, yet.

[Cliff]

If you keep the lights off you can get rid of the algae

I would be interested to see if your rocks are leaching out nitrates or phosphates. Your test results should tell you that. I would go ahead and test for nitrates now just to see

[AllenIsbell]

I will get on that ASAP. Gotta make my son some dinner!

[AllenIsbell]

Nitrates: ~10 ppm
Nitrites: 0 ppm

[Cliff]

Well,.. it looks like that is the cause of the algae. If this is higher than the nitrate level in your tap water, I would suggest water changes until the nitrate level in the tank matches the nitrate level of your tap water.

[AllenIsbell]

That ish was hair algae. I got rid of it with a toothbrush and leaving the light off 24/7. Look like there was some red slime in there, too. Got rid of it.

At what point in the cycle should I do a water change?

[Cliff]

Generally speaking, when/if you ammonia gets over 2ppm, or to lower the nitrates as low as you can before adding fish

[AllenIsbell]

Okay. Thanks, amigo.