cyano battle lol

[Reef Pilot]

Originally Posted by michika

"Cheap"? Right...cheap is relative don't forget.

Per the Brightwell page for dosing instructions; high nutrient is 5mL/25g for the first two weeks, then you switch to the low nutrient dosing levels which is 5mL/50g. Currently my tank has a volume of 600g, soon to be about 750g. Using the 600g number on a large tank like mine I'd be dosing in EXCESS of 120mL/day at the initial dosing recommendation and then about 60mL/day. A 2L bottle is $40.10 at JL (excluding shipping and taxes). A 2L bottle will last me 16.66 days at the high nutrient dosing amount. The lower dosing would last a little more then a month; 36.36 days. Therefor I could expect to have a fixed monthly cost of $40 + shipping & taxes. That isn't particularly economic. Add in the fix costs of running your tank (utilities, food, salt, etc.) and you can be easily paying out a large monthly cost for your hobby enjoyment.

Catherine, was just wondering further how my costs with a 230g system are only $20/year, while you were looking at $40/ mo with a 600g system. The Brightwell instructions state no more than 5 ml/50g/week (not per day) for a stable, low nutrient system. So, if I do the math on your tank, the costs should be less than $80 for a full year.

And remember these are seed bacteria, so Brightwell says this dosage can be decreased by a further 50% over time to maintain a stable, low nutrient system. I think this means that you need to keep your nitrates and phosphates low. But even with your very large 600g system, your costs could be less than $40 per year. So again, I do consider that cheap, considering all the benefits (not just cyano prevention) that MB7 provides.

[wreck]

Well cyano is gone. Nitrates after a 20 gallon wc are 10 ppm. Skimmer is bonkers loll.

How long should I wait to do another wc?

[wreck]

Well cyano is gone. Nitrates after a 20 gallon wc are 10 ppm. Skimmer is bonkers loll.

How long should I wait to do another wc?

[darkreef]

25% ever 24 hours over three days then start pouring out the skimmer in the sink till it returns to normal. That's what I did anyways . I also blew my rocks off each time to get the dead stuff the cyano had suffocated into the siphon . Then cleaned any power heads , return pumps and glass.

Then have fun preventing it from coming back ...
I don't have a lick of algae but I still get carpets of cyano if I'm not carefull

Forgot to dip a frag a few weeks ago bam out break

I'm so sick of dosing that I just manually fight it.. Sick of loosing skimmers

[brotherd]

Well, well, well. Guess who is having a re visit with cyano. Good times...not.

[darkreef]

I just beat it without using chemicals !! One week cyano free

[wreck]

Im close to a week now aswell.

[asylumdown]

I know in forum world this thread is getting long in the tooth, but I want to add that I also appear to have beat cyano. Also, I want to walk back further some elements of my earlier criticisms of bacterial supplementation.

1 - I did a two course back to back treatment of chemiclean, and that appears to have wiped the cyano completely out.

2 - I started using MB7 right after the chemiclean treatment using the 'start up dose', which in my tank works out to approx 70-75ml of MB7 a day. Let me tell you that burns through a bottle right quick. Earlier I had said that I was suspicious over whether or not anything was actually alive in those bottles, but after dosing such large amounts of MB7 I've noticed some novel changes in my tank - first, my glass has been getting coated in this hazy, hard to wipe off film. Not your normal film algae, but something that seems more tenacious. It builds up quickly, going from crystal clear to looking hazy sometimes overnight. It takes quite a bit of persistence with the magfloat to get it off. Also, my skimmer's behaviour has completely changed. It's hard to really describe, but the foam column is much taller than it used to be. I've had to dial it way back because it now overflows if I set the water height in the same place I used to. The past two times I've cleaned the skimmer cup, the neck of it has been coated in this thick, whitish/clear slime that peels off of it in sheets below the line where the actual brownish/black skimmate gunk starts. It's strangely difficult to get off, you need to rub really hard near the edge of it to get a strip you can peel off started, it doesn't dissolve away like normal skimmer gunk just by running your fingers over it. That's never happened before.

I have to assume that those two changes, both on the glass, and in the skimmer, are bacterial biofilms. I've never had them before, and they's so obviously different from what I'm used to seeing in my tank I have to conclude they're coming from the heavy dosing of MB7, as other than the killing the cyano that's the only thing I've changed. There's obviously something living in what I'm dosing. It's kind of a PITA (it took me over 10 minutes to clean the skimmer cup last night when it normally only takes 3), so I'm hoping it stops happening once I go down to the normal 'maintenance' dose of MB7 (which should be soon, I didn't actually note the date when I started. Oops).

On the 3rd day of my two part chemi-clean treatment, measurable phosphates in my tank spiked to 0.05ppm, which leads me to believe that the cyano had sequestered a fair amount of it and was consuming nutrients before my GFO/pellet reactor could get to it. Some of my 'coal mine canary' corals also rapidly began browning out. I've been changing my GFO weekly since to drive the phosphate levels as low as possible and now most corals are back to their 'low nutrient' colours, and I'm consistently testing 0.00 phosphate on the hanna checker with no cyano growth anywhere in the tank.

We'll see if it ever comes back, a couple weeks obviously isn't a very good predictor of success, but so far so good.