Hey Reefkeeper, here's a rundown of the mess
Back when the DT was 70 gal and I had less nuisance issues (aside from the dino) and was growing LPS and SPS and my clam was happy I was watching params every 2-4 weeks and working on methods to maintain them, usual reef keeping stuff. Then over the course of a year things started to go sideways, water changes weren't helping, livestock suffered... I downsized the DT to 35 gal to get more light for the clam. Shortly afterward we sold the condo, so I picked everything up and moved in with my mom in Abby while we waited to take possession of the house. By this point pretty much all livestock was gone, and most corals. It was at this point that I finally nailed down the cause of the illness as a bad batch of salt, but by that time it was too late. It seems extremely obvious to test the new water being put into the tank, but you just take it for granted that fresh RO water with salt = AOK... Won't make that mistake again.
Month or so later we moved into the house and set up as it is now. As part of the previous troubleshooting I was now on 100% new water and new sand (same LR). It was at this point that the nuisance problems started to get bad but I didn't have the time or the funds to do much about it. The one thing I could attribute to the sudden mess was my TDS meter reporting about ten times the amount of junk in the tapwater in Abbotsford as compared to Langley, and for the first time was actually reading something on the output side of my RODI system. Occasional param checks showed everything in line in the tank (pretty much no coral growth to move them) and never any detectable Nitrate or Silicate. Still 1ppm is not huge and I've heard of people running their tank on tap water in the GVRD which is about 15ish ppm TDS. This continued for about a year. Along the way I also had a bacterial bloom which had never happened before. A month or so with a UV sterilizer took care of that.
Fast forward to about 6 months ago and I can finally refresh my RODI cartridges. I hit the tank with a Chemiclean treatment and a 20% WC with the new filters. Tank cleaned up, but shortly thereafter algae grew like mad, followed by a slower but still very heavy growth of Cyano. Now I'm making a better effort to remove as much crap as I can when I do the regular water changes, which is slowing the regrowth of the Cyano, but hair algae is still there (buried under Cyano)....
|