Hey Snaz,
Thanks very much for the reply...
the filter is a small biowheel with carbon and filter floss cartridge. I also use a small bit of "pura filtration pad" that I just threw out. I will use the last few chunks of it over the next week or two, changing them every couple of days. thanks for the suggestion; i've just read recently that they can turn into nitrate pads, but mine is on the other side of the carbon and floss filter just for extra filtration.
dosing stuff - i just dosed once, but I will cease and desist as of now
testing - the tests were done at a LFS actually, and ran out of the water i provided before we could do further testing of parameters.
I never had any problems with hair algae and cyano either until this fall which is why it is concerning me. Although...things started sort of after this
: I had an outright destructive pod infestation.
seriously! all the big pods (i think they are arthropods) ate all the little ones, grew enormous, thousands of them that started eating everything in my tank when i had taken out all the caluerpa I had growing out of control (which was probably keeping everything in check). They were eating all my zoos and started chewing on snails and anything. At one point my entire tank turned carnivorous. so, I did a freshwater dip on the two main rocks and thousands erupted from the rocks along with flatworms and most of my good inverts. I was just afraid that I would have had another catastrophe because of the ferocious pods. probably another bad decision!
since then, my tank has really struggled dealing with keeping everything in check it seems like. I haven't been able to keep any sps alive and my softies have not grown at all for a few months. I've been thinking of trying to replenish the copepod population; I've seen a few since the crash, but not many.
I'll check out a place to get RO/DI water as well...
how could one do a mini-cycle on this tank?