small refugium.. what to go in it?

[Myka]

What is the purpose of your refugium? Reduce nutrients, increase pods, decorative, ??

[asylumdown]

reduce nutrients. The live rock has been growing a thick bed of a rather unattractive macro-algae that is competing with my zoas and requires nearly an hour of manual removal once every two weeks, plus I accidentally brought in a very aggressive species of grape caulerpa that snakes it's way through all my frags and rips them apart when I pull it out. I can never seem to get all of it.

For the longest time the tank only had two tail spot blennies, but in breaking down my big tank I had to add a pygmy angel, two cleaner shrimp and several snails that I really wanted to keep. I'm now feeding 3X more than what I was previously feeding. The algae was annoying before (though, thankfully not brown slime or cyano), but now it's exploding. The pygmy angel won't touch the nastiest of the macro algae, nor will the snails or blennies. The fuge will be between the wall and the tank so I'll have to be looking on purpose to see it (don't much care if it's pretty)

[Myka]

Originally Posted by asylumdown

reduce nutrients.

Then imo, the only thing you should have in there is a ball of chaeto and a strong light. For this purpose, I would suggest you move the refugium to hang on your sump instead of the back of the tank so that light leak from the fuge won't bother your tank. Lights on chaeto can be run up to 18 hours a day, and reverse cycle as the tank is would help increase overall daily pH. The ball of chaeto should be allowed to freely roll in the fuge, and should be trimmed regularly to prevent it from overgrowing. The chaeto sucks up the nutrients, and when you trim the chaeto and remove a portion you are removing those bound up nutrients from the tank.

Imo, a DSB in that small of a tank would not be helpful for reducing nutrients.

[asylumdown]

Thanks Myka, I think I'll do just that.