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Old 01-09-2014, 06:16 PM
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asylumdown asylumdown is offline
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First, I your tank is incredible. I wish I had the skills to build all the stuff around it that you did, it looks like a professional installed tank that's been there from day one, but from the looks of it the only 'permanent' changes to the house were a couple of holes in the wall. Brilliant.

Second, did you get your algae problem under control? I know that many people think this is cheating, but when I was struggling with a serious algae problem last October, nothing I did seemed to work. I was changing the GFO every few days, had a biopellet reactor running at full bore, but it just wasn't helping. I think once the problem reaches a certain level the algae is sucking everything up before your export systems ever get a chance.

I ordered API's algaefix marine off eBay (It's not technically legal in Canada still I don't think), and in about 8 days my tank was 100% algae free. It didn't hurt the corals or the fish, and once it was gone my export systems actually had a chance to do their job and the tank quickly dropped down to the ULN range with aggressive GFO changes, the pellets, and regular water changes. In fact I think I drove it a little too low and everything went all pastel for a few months. I've never had a recurrence of hair algae. Only thing it didn't kill was coraline and bubble algae, but I don't think bubble algae will be even a little fazed when our sun eventually expands to a red giant and vaporizes all other life on earth, and it can switch to using my hatred for fertilizer when nitrate and phosphate levels are too low, so I'm not really surprised.

If your'e struggling with it, it's a quick fix that lets the infrastructure you've set up actually do it's job.
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