Uh-oh, Dinos.
So since the fish started going back in the tank, I've been feeding more (obviously). The tank hit a nice ULNS with the small amount I was feeding while it was fallow for 4 months, and the water, rocks, and glass we crystal clear. I've been monitoring N and P closely since the fish started going back in, and the levels have consistently stayed in the undetectable to trace range, but I was noticing a teeny tiny patch of what I thought was cyano in one corner.
over a week the patch kept getting bigger and bigger, and then I started noticing what I thought was a diatom bloom on my sand and on my rocks. The 'diatoms' and cyano also happened to coincide with a melt down of my RO membrane, so I assumed the water was getting an influx of garbage from Calgary tap water.
Cleaned, bleached, and fixed my RO unit, drained, cleaned, and refilled my RO reservoir, and did two back to back 50 gallon water changes over the course of two days, and the problem didn't improve. Not one to let something get out of hand, I turned off my skimmer and phosphate reactor, and dosed chemi-clean as per instructions yesterday. One teeny tiny little spot of cyano (not the big patch that caused the initial concern) died in a few hours, but today, oh man. The sand bed has almost disappeared under a carpet of brown, stringy, bubble entrapping goo, and the rocks look like snotty brown cobwebs have draped themselves all over everything. It's starting to look to me like I don't have cyano after all, and what I'm dealing with is in fact Dinoflagellates. A quick search online says that chemo-clean might actually make dinos worse.
I'm getting conflicting information on how to deal with this. Some accounts say total blackout for three days, lots of siphoning and water changes, activated carbon, phosphate media, and raised pH. Some say no water changes at all and to just let the bloom run it's course.
nutrient levels still test undetectable, and there's no other nuisance algae in the tank. What have you all done to beat this?
ETA: spelling and auto-correct fails
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