New to Hobby, Inherited tank with new house, boy do I need help.
Hi I am new to this Hobby, I recently bought a House three months ago that came with a established tank the owners did not want to move. I have been scouring internet boards and my local LFS trying to get up to speed as quickly as possible. It has been a frustrating and expensive learning curve. Below are my tank specs. When I got the tank Nitrates were completely off the charts (180) but there was no huge Algae problem.
As I learned, I made some mistakes along the way, mainly I was over feeding. Now I feed once daily either “High Quality” flakes or ˝ a cube of rinsed/thawed mysis. As much as I have been able to bring down Nitrates they are still way too high and my algae problem while isn’t exploding is not going away even with all the critters that eat it.
I have brown flakey algae, green hair algae, red fuzzy aglae….
I would like some advice. Do I need a better skimmer (what HOB model would you recommend)? Do I get rid of the filters, if so will I have enough flow(no sump)? Do I change the substrate to sand (I have no secondary tank to help in this process)? What else can I be doing? I love this hobby and I want to have a healthy happy tank.
Tank Specs:
90 Gallon Tank 48x24x18
Lighting – Brand spanking new 48” Aquatic Life T5 HO (10 hours per day)
(2) 48" T5 HO 54W 420/460 Lamps
(2) 48" T5 HO 54W 10,000K Lamps
(4) 1W Lunar LED's
Skimmer:
Red Sea Prizm HOB
Filters:
One Marine Land Penguin 100 w/Bio Wheel HOB
One Unbranded canister Filter HOB
Power Heads x2
Substrate:
Crushed Coral
Livestock:
- Neon Dotty Back
- Powder Blue Tang
- 2 Clowns
- Lawnmower Blenny
- 3 turbo snails
- 3 Urchins (pincushion, Unidentified A black medium with wide flat spines , Unidentified medium sized one that is brown/yellow small spines
- 6 dwarf blue legged hermits
Coral
- One Colt Coral
- A crap ton of mushrooms
- Frogspawn 4 branches
- Toadstools 5 stalks
- Unidentified White tree coral
Parameters:
- PH – 8.4
- Temp 78.5
- Phosphate 2 ppm
- Nitrate 40 ( was 180 three months ago)
- Specific Gravity 1.026
Maintenance Regime:
- 10g water change once a week with a vacuum to clean substrate. I am using instant ocean salt
- I use tap water that has tested zero for Phosphates and Nitrates. I eventually want to get a RO unit but it is not in the budget just yet.
- Twice weekly I clean the protein skimmer
- Once a month I will replace the filter media/floss on one of the filters. The next month the other one.
- API liquid test kits are being used.
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