New to Hobby, Inherited tank with new house, boy do I need help.

[Ron99]

Try a couple larger water changes to help get the nitrates down. Also, ditch the filter floss or change it out weekly as it will collect detritus and become a nitrate factory. HOB and canister filters are really of little use in a reef tank. You could use the canister filter to hold media bags of carbon etc.

[toxic111]

The phosphates are way too high as well.. consider a phosban reactor. I would also buy or borrow a TDS meter & test your tap water. I would use RO bottled water until you can get your own unit.

I will second getting rid of the HOB filters, or just using them to hold carbon or chemi-pure. Also check the model of skimmer to see if it is rated for your size of tank.

Not know the size of your powerheads, you might want to look at somethin better like a vortech for better flow.

I battled bad hair algae for over a year, and I am finally starting to win. I added a sump, better skimmer, a vortec, better lights. Before this time I was scrubbing rock once a week & doing 2-10gal water changes a week. this on a 30gal tank, it was bad.

Spme pictures of the tank & set-up might help us help you as well.

[mseepman]

The Prizm skimmer is unfortunately a real piece of garbage. I had one and ran it for a long time before realizing this.

You didn't mention how much room you have on the back of your tank...but this will influence what type of HOB skimmer you can use. I've had good luck with my Aquamedic Blue1000 which cost me about $199US. I know you probably don't really want to pour more money into this but a decent skimmer is pretty important. You might also look into the Eshopps skimmers for a low cost alternative.

Ditch the filters unless you can just use them for things like carbon and phosphate re-mover.

Otherwise, just keep the faith and make slow steady changes.

[ponokareefer]

I would look at getting a better skimmer for sure. An aqua c remora pro would be an upgrade over what you have. You could keep the filters, but only have filter floss or carbon running in them, and then make sure you keep the filter floss clean. You could also run Purigen and Chemi-pure in them, both of which I use and work good. As for the substrate, that is a matter of great debate. I use a DSB, while others use crushed coral, and still others use nothing. I would do some more reading on which one you prefer. The crushed coral shouldn't be affecting your system a lot unless it is full of food/poop. The phosphates are an issue, and probably getting into your system from tap water. Look to either use bottled water, which I started with, and then went to a RO unit. Without doing something about the phosphate, you will have some sort of algae issues. There are certain chemicals/media you can use to take it out as well.
Finally, do a couple of large water changes with water that has no phosphates in it. Good luck!

[Fellow]

Thank you all for the replies. Ill take some time to read over these tonight and post a few follow up questions with pictures of my setup to provide some additonal contex.

[Fishward]

Your skimmer seems to be a bit under-rated for the system. http://www.redseafish.com/Prod126.asp the website says its good for up to 40 gallons, which means its actually good for 30. +1 to tossing the canisters and upgrading the skimmer. what size powerheads do you have? some more flow may help with the algae problems..

[don.ald]

i would cut the light period down to 5hrs a day or even less to battle the algae problem.
maybe even a day or two of no light to start with. cloudy day never hurts the coral or fish. just hurts the algae