hear algae + browning corals

[KevinK]

Originally Posted by MitchM

That's a nice looking tank, full of life.

I think there is a detritus buildup happening, between your display tank sandbed and live rock pile.
Between coral secretions, fish excretions and premium food, your tank could be "full". There's no room left for the detritus to go now except for back into the water column.
Excess phosphate will retard coral growth.

I have a few suggestions:
-Turn your frag tank into a 24/7 lit refugium where you could harvest macro algae.
-Use a powerhead to blow out detritus buildup from in behind the rock setup on a regular basis
-vacuum your display tank shallow sandbed on a regular basis (what you can get to, anyways)
-Increase your GFO use.
-Increase your activated carbon use
-Increase water change routine (maybe increase it to 2 X 10%/month)
-Keep harvesting your hair algae. That's essentially what your refugium will be for, except the algae will be kept to the refugium.

The real difficult thing will be the sandbed that is under the rock pile. There is no simple way of cleaning that. That will continually leach out accumulated algae nutrients.
Hopefully you will have some success by running a refugium that can keep up.



Mitch

forgot to mention that I have a fudge, with a package of about 4 gallon of cheato

what you cant see is how the tank was build up, I will ad some pictures, underneathe the, call it rock face there is a 1 inch perforated pipe
- one under the back rock face
-one on the left rock face
- one onder the island rock face

the rock sit on the pipe, and sand was spread around it, there might be some sand here and there, but where I could not reach it, I did not put it

these pipes are conected to a 1000 g/h pump and I once a week turn each induvidual pump on to stir things from underneath.

each rock face is only one rock deep and staged against egg crate, so there is in fact no pile of rock, but only the one you see.

the back rock face is stagged against the egg crate, bihind it there is I have a maxi jet 1200+ mod, to blow things out

as bihind the tank there is the filter room, I left the part that is behind the rock open, so I can se what is happening behind my rock, and as I can se behind the entire length of the back face (4 feet) there is non buiuld up, as there is a fair amount of curent.

my sand bed in deed, I can clean when water changing

- as I never used carbon, I started this 2 weeks ago (one phosban reactor full) planning to change it each 3 weeks

- I never used GFO, so I also started that (800 ml, and wil change it each 3 weeks)

- my bio pellets where almost gone so I added 1000 ml

- water changing wil be incresed to each 2 weeks

- I will get away from the frozen food for a while and feed a bit les (only have about 12 ore 14 fish)

- I will rip the cheto apart so itis not one big clumb, and so it can grow easyer