Saltwater Aquarium Waterbox 100.3 Build - Raising the pH

Some weeks have passed since adding the first couple clown fish to the saltwater tank.  I even added a second fish, a yellow watchman goby paired with a pistol shrimp.  I love how the shrimp burrows in the sand and the goby sets up guard.  It was a great pair to watch and while the goby always had a sour look on his face, I could usually find him standing guard in one of the tunnel openings the pistol shrimp had created.   When feeding time came I could usually also find the goby coming to grab some morsels.   However after a few days I stopped seeing the watchman goby even though I still heard the pistol shrimp making his popping sound for which he got his name.  I looked and looked, even behind my tank fearing he jumped out.    A couple weeks passed and I still don't see him so I fear I lost him either from jumping out of the tank or some other unknown reason.  I went to my LFS and got another one and he has been doing awesome.  It only took a few hours and he was already buddies with the pistol shrimp.

The other thing I have been monitoring lately is the pH in my tank.  The pH would go up during the light cycle to around 7.95 and drop to around 7.85 or even lower when the lights went out.  I really wanted to try to get the pH up a bit closer to 8.0 or 8.1 as I start to think about adding some coral.   The pH a bit closer to 8 and above can be a bit more stable for incoming coral in my past experience.  

Here the pH before and after trying to find a simple way to have it trend a little higher.  

One of the ways I have seen to get the pH up just a bit is to use a CO2 scrubber.   Too much Carbon dioxide gas in the house will get into the water and bring the pH down.  Some folks just open a window to bring fresh air in the house and can raise pH.   Due to the weather, I will our windows shut most of the time, so the other option is that you can run so air going into your tank through some media that absorbs CO2.   If you hook a reactor with CO2 absorbing media to your skimmer then the air in pulled into the skimmer after being scrubbed of CO2 and the "cleaner" air gets mixed into the tank water through the the skimmer.

Bulk Reef Supply has a general media reactor and you can also get CO2 absorbing media to add to the reactor.  I added the media to the reactor, and attached plastic tubing to the air inlet valve on the skimmer.    Once I turned the skimmer on you can see above the pH has now jumped to over 8.0 in the light cycle and does not tumble quite as much as before at night.   

Here is the picture of the setup.   The plastic tube that came with the reactor was too big to fit on the skimmer.  I could have gotten an adapter, but I found another way was just to push the smaller tube inside of the larger tube.   It works for now although i know there is a much more professional solution.  The incoming air is pulled through the reactor, C02 is absorbed and the air is fed into the skimmer where it goes into the water from the tank.  Since there is less CO2 entering the water, the pH does not dip as much.

Here is the media I use:

One other modification is to have the skimmer itself actually supply the air that goes into the reactor by adding a tube from the "IN" side of the reactor to the collection cup.   I have not done this yet, but will probably try in the near future.   By having this "closed" system you can get a even better bump in the CO2.   

Waterbox 100.3 Saltwater Aquarium Build - First fish

My aquarium is was all set up, the lights are on and everything seems to be running pretty well.  The initial build post can be here:  Waterbox 100.3 build

The only big tweak I have to made in the last weeks is that my Nyos skimmer was not adjusting very well and was sending the bubbles up too high.  Some of this was just the skimmer needed the normal  break in period.    However the skimmer was still acting up on me even after a few days of continuous running.   The big adjustment I made was raising the skimmer up one inch t match the manufacturer recommendation.  I did this with a little eggcrate stand I found on amazon.   It raised the skimmer exactly one inch and the skimmer is now really working well.

I had been patiently waiting to finally get some fish!  I made a trip to my local fish store with the intent to get 2 bonded clown fish as the first inhabitants.   The store had a few bonded pairs, but I kept coming back to a pair of Longfin Mocha Clown fish.  These are captive bred designer clown fish that originated from Sea and Reef Aquaculture and the fishstore had a beautiful pair.

This was information from the Sea and Reef site on the creation of this Longfin Mocha clownfish.

The creation of our Longfin Mocha Clownfish

The mutation that created our longfin clownfish came from a single fish. In December 2013 our Hatchery Manager Brandon Weik was looking into a tank of several thousand Black and White Ocellaris (also called Darwin Ocellaris). He spotted a fish that looked very different than his brothers (all clownfish are born male). It had long flowing fins and was getting beaten up, probably because of its different look. The fish was isolated and later paired up. A story was published about our findings in Reef Builders in April 2014. You can read the article by clicking here.

Our Black and White longfin clownfish was paired up and shortly after the pair started to produce offspring.  Unfortunately, less than 1% of the offspring produced displayed the longfin trait. For the last five years the Sea & Reef team has been working tirelessly on increasing the yield of longfin clownfish offspring and producing different variations. While the yield has increased, we are still not able to produce longfin clownfish in very large quantities so expect the release to be somewhat limited.

I brought these two home and started acclimating them to my tank's water.

And here they are exploring.  They are inseparable and do everything together. 

I'll give these two some time in the tank before seeing what I add next. 

Saltwater Reef Aquarium Build - Waterbox 100.3

It's now been a little over two years since I moved from North Carolina to Indiana.  I was reflecting on our moves throughout the years and realized I had essentially had some sort of fish aquarium at every house I had ever lived in.   Before we moved to Indiana, I broke down and sold my saltwater tank and I have really missed the hobby.   So here is what I am working on and where I stand to getting a saltwater reef tank set up again!

Choosing The Aquarium

I went back and forth on the size and aquarium I wanted to try based on previous learnings.   It is kinda like owning a house, in that over time you realize what you like and what you would like to change next time.  My last tank was a 125 gallon tank and it took up a lot of space.  I wanted to have a bit of a smaller footprint.  My last tank also was rimmed and had a unfinished stand and I must admit that a rimless tank is so much more aesthetically pleasing.  My wife also put her foot down that the stand should look nice and not just a bunch of unfinished 2x4s.  The biggest learning was that I wanted more of a plug and play system.  On my last system, I drilled holes in the aquarium for the overflow, I built all the plumbing with PVC piping,  I added a sump and pieced the system together one project at a time.  I was a fun learning experience. but this time I am ready to just set a system up with all the pieces right at my fingertips.  

I looked at so many aquariums to find a set up I thought I would like.  The aquariums that I really liked were from Red Sea, Planet Aquarium and Waterbox.  I read reviews and looked at many pictures from other owners.  In the end I chose to go with Waterbox.  Their aquariums are beautifully constructed and come with a stand, a sump and all the plumbing.  Basically you can set up the aquarium, stand and have it plumbed all in one package.  

The specific Waterbox aquarium I ended up ordering was the Waterbox 100.3 as it had the footprint i was really looking for.

I placed the order and waited for it to arrive which took about 6 weeks.  The delivery process went very smoothly. I got a call from the freight driver saying he was on his way and he put the pallet right in my garage.  

Once I unwrapped everything the crate for the actual aquarium is secured with screws and very well packaged.

The next step is assembling the aquarium stand and getting the aquarium set on the stand.   The stand was well constructed and was easy enough to put together.  There are plenty of videos that are on Ythat are even easier to follow than the printed instructions.    A neighbor was nice enough to come over and help me move the aquarium from the garage onto the stand.

Adding the sump and plumbing was also very straightforward.   Waterbox has a bunch of youtube videos that made the plumbing setup even easier to follow.

The Equipment

I was also working on acquiring all the other equipment I would need as well as pulling old equipment from my last tanks out of storage.

Return Pump

The return pump is the heart of your aquarium.  Water overflows from your aquarium into your sump and then is pumped back up to the aquarium by the pump.   I really wanted a silent sump and the ability to easily change the flow and chose the Ecotech Vectra S2.    

Lights

I chose the Ecotech Radion XR15 Blue.   Radion's come with a XR15 "Blue" model and a "Pro" model.   The blues give a bit more of a blue hue while the Pros give a bit more of a white hue out of the box.  I prefer the blue light for viewing a reef tank over the white, but it is mostly personal preference.  People have success growing coral with either type.    The RMS mounts also make hanging the lights a breeze.

Skimmer 

I also wanted a very quiet skimmer and staying within Ecotech family I chose the Nyos 120.

Flow - Powerheads

Again keeping with on the Ecotech theme,  I received 2 MP40 quietdrives to add to the system

Here is the waterbox sump, lights, skimmer and powerheads.   My original shipment was missing one MP40, but the supplier quickly shipped me the second one.

Sand 

I went with Special Grade "live" sand from Caribsea.  When I did the calculation 80 lbs of sand (4 bags) was the recommendation, but once I added the sand to the tank I just used 60 lbs (3 bags).

Rock

I wanted to go with dry rock as opposed to already cured rock.  I had some dry rock from my last tanks, but that rock had been through some high phosphate blooms and a really bad dinoflagellate outbreak over the years.     So I figured it was good time to just start over.  I went with the Caribsea LifeRock.   I got ~80 lbs of rock that was a combination of the original,(40 lbs) shapes (20 lbs) and arches (20 lbs).  I played around a bit with how I wanted the rock to look before putting it into the tank.

 Controller

I had an Apex system set up on my last tank.  It basically comes with a power strip and a controller that supports probes such as conductivity, temperature and pH. 

Once everything is plugged in and the probes are are online the Apex controller connects with an app where you can monitor the water parameters as well as turn on/off any equipment that is plugged in.

Here is the apex app after I have everything plugged in.

Controller Board

The Apex power strip,  the Apex controller unit, the S2 vectra pump and teh 2 MP40s all have units that need to go somewhere.  I used an adaptive reef controller board to help organize all the cords and controllers.  

Other Apps 

The Ecotech family of products also has its own app called Mobius where you can control the equipment.   I prefer going into APEX to control everything, but for initial setups the Mobius can get your your lights, pumps and powerheads scheduled with a template.   I still use the APEX app to turn things on/off if needed (feeding, etc.)

I have  set the  MP40s to 60% flow on Reefcrest mode and the Vectra return pump to 75% constant.  Changing the settings are very easy in the app.  I did have to do a lot of updates to firmware for the equipment through the app and to try it multiple times in some cases, but once I got through the updates the app has seemed pretty stable. 

The lights also have a way to set automated times, spectrums and ramping schedules.   I am using the AB+ template for now.  

Water 

The water is the most critical piece of of any aquarium system.  Most saltwater systems use RO water.  You can usually purchase this from a fish store or make your own.  In order to make your own, there are RO systems that will do the job and I  am using a 5 stage RO system from Bulk Reef Supply.   It has a TDS meter built in so that i can target 0 TDS output water.

Salt

Everyone has opinion on the best salt.   I went to Tropic Marin Pro salt and have been targeting a 1.025 salinity.  It mixes amazing! and does not have any residue at all.    One note is that it does have a low alkalify.  So far I am reading a 6.8 and would rather be around 8.  So I will probably add some soda ash in the future to any water I make.  

The Final Build

After getting all the supplies, adding the rock and sand and making the water, I filled the tank.  I used a pump to pump in water from a big Brute 40 gallon trash can to the aquarium.   

Here was everything up and running with the water added. I also added some LED strip lights underneath the cabinet to make for some fun lighting.

Cycling

Once everything is up and running, the patience has to kick in to cycle the tank.  this is where the tank needs to build up bacteria that can convert Ammonia to Nitrite to Nitrate.   In order to do this I added Dr Tim's Ammonia.  I started with 12 mL of ammonia and ran an ammonia test.  Sure enough I had a lot of ammonia in the system.   I also added a bottle of Bio-spira which is nitrifying bacteria.  This just helps colonize the tank.   

 I ran an ammonia test every day and sure enough after about 7 days I had 0 ammonia.  At this point I added about 6 more mL of ammonia and after only 1 day it was back to 0.  This let me know that I had bacteria that was successfully converting ammonia which is important because ammonia is toxic to fish.   I also ran nitrate tests and it was pretty high so I did about an 60% water change and brought it under 8 ppm.  In about 3 weeks I had a cycled tank with addition of ammonia, live sand, and bio-spira.  I felt my tank was ready to introduce its first fish so stay tuned.

Dinoflagellates in the Reef Tank - What, Why, and How?

Dino what?  Yeah that is what I said until I started looking more into the what, why and how.   I remember going to the beach with my parents one week for vacation and there were warnings everywhere.   The warnings were about the "red tide."   In fact I remember the water had a brownish red hue as the waves crashed into the shore.    It turns out that the red tide is caused by dinoflagellates, a type of single celled algae.   Some dinoflagellates produce a toxin that can harm marine life and humans alike.  Most of the time when humans get sick it is from eating seafood that has ingested the dinoflagellates, but some cases of sickness have occurred from breathing in aerosolized toxin or even skin contact.  Look up Ciguatera and you will hope you never eat any contaminated fish with this particular dinoflagellate toxin.

Just recently dinoflagellates were in the news as  a red tide is hitting San Diego beaches.   In this case the "red" is replaced by blue as the dinoflagellates are showing bio-luminescence at night. 

So dinoflagellates can be beautiful, but they are known for the toxins they produce.   So when these things bloom in your reef aquarium it can cause all kinds of problems!  Here is my story with dinoflagellates and I hope this story along with other stories can help those in the hobby.

It all started when I noticed my white sand in my tank was turning a thick greenish color.  After I read about it I thought I had identified what I had as cyanobacteria.   This is a bacteria that gets its energy through photosynthesis.   However it can take over parts of the aquarium and does not look very pretty.

There is a chemical called chemiclean that is supposed to do a really good job on cyanobacteria so I tried it.   I would speculate that an antibiotic is one of the main actives.   It worked really well and my green slime algae (cyano) was gone.

It was only a couple weeks later that my beautiful white sand was turning a brownish color.   I just thought it was cyano again since cyano can present as a brown, green, or purple color.   I did another treatment of chemiclean and this time the brown stayed.  The chemiclean did not touch it.  This is when I knew I was dealing with something else.  And it was only getting worse.  My entire sandbed started to turn brown.

I started to research and when you start looking at something that is brown and not cyano it is probably diatoms or dinoflagellates.  Diatoms are also a type of algae that usually bloom and then go away, so they are not usually a bad thing.  Dinoflagellates on the other hand are probably one of the worse things a hobbyist can get.  I started to panic a little.   This is also where I learned a valuable lesson.  Even with cyano I just treated based on some visual observations and a guess.

In hindsight I had another clue that I should have paid attention to.  Dinoflagellates also produce toxins.  Some produce more than others, but in my case I had ~75 small snails die very quickly.  Even the bigger snails would fall off the glass almost like they were drunk.  Look for these observations as well since it will help your identification.

In my case brown was mainly in the sand.  Some dinos will grow on your rock (and coral) as well and people will describe "snotty strands" of brown algae with bubbles coming off the rocks.  If you ever see that in your tank or hear that description, then dinos are a very probably cause. 

STEP 1:  USE A MICROSCOPE FOR IDENTIFICATION

Before you do any type of treatment, identification is so important.   Almost anything that happens in your aquarium can be treated if you have the right identification.  If you treat something without the proper identification you can do more harm.  Go to amazon or a store and buy a cheap kid microscope.  You can find these for under 20 dollars an it is all you need.  Here is one I found at a toy store.

I took a sample of my water and look under scope for the moment of truth.  That is when my heart sank.

I did not want to see anything moving, because the "flagllate" part of the dinoflagellate name means they have a flagellum.  A flagellum is a whiplike tail that lets it move.   And look at how many there are in just a drop of water!!

Once I realized I had dinoflagellates I needed to figure out what kind I have.  There are lots of types and as I would find out they all are a little different in how they should be treated.

I also realized that I was not the only one battling these things.  In fact dinoflagellates may be one of the few things that can happen to a hobbyist to cause them to give up and get out of the hobby.  There are so many stories of people getting out of the hobby or restarting from scratch because of these monsters.  This is because there is no easy fix.  Almost any other fish infection, algae bloom, or problem has a specific treatment or product.  Many of these products can fix a problem in days.   This is not so with dinoflagellates and I was about to learn that.   If you have these in your tank you need to read the forum over at REEF2REEF.  We are talking about hundreds of posts with help, but most importantly they can help you identify your particular dinoflagellate.  I cannot thank this community enough.

Read this thread!

https://www.reef2reef.com/threads/dinoflagellates-%E2%80%93-are-you-tired-of-battling-altogether.293318/

Here are the major dinoflagellates that hobbyist find in their tanks the most.  I took these pictures from the forums to help consolidate some info.

1.  Ostreopsis:  These are usually more sesame seed in shape.  They will move into the water column at night.

2.  Prorocentrum:  These are usually more oval, but can be rounder too.

3.  Coolia:  These are usually round and darker in color.

4.  Amphidinium:  The biggest sign you have this type is they will stay in the sand.  If your sandbed is the only thing affected and you have IDed dinoflagellates their is a good chance you have amhidinium.  This type comes in two versions, large cells and small cells.   Both seem to react fairly similar in the tank.

There can be other strains that may be in your tank, but these seem to be the biggest threats.  Many times you might have multiple types at the same time too which can make things even more difficult.

So once you have an ID the next step is to develop a treatment plan.  I had Amphidinium.   The identification came from how the cells look under microscope, the fact I was having a die off of snails, and the observation that the sand bed is what was mostly infected.

WHY DO WE GET THESE IN OUR TANK?

Before we get into treatment plans, why do you get these?  Well they are everywhere and there are probably already in your tank, but they just never bloom.  A bloom is where you will see them and they will start casing problems.

After reading the forums and and thoughts from other hobbyists the biggest reason I think dinos seem to bloom is because they do not have any competition.    I think there are two big reasons as to why dinoflagellates have no competition.

1.  Low phosphates and nitrates.   When I started my tank, my phosphates started to rise and I did everything I could to get them down.   When you have nitrates and phosphates get out of hand, you get all kinds of algae growing in your tank like hair algae or bubble algae.  We don't want that either.   So I added a GFO reactor and even an algae scrubber which eventually took my phosphates to almost 0.  I was very careful to not overfeed my fish and did not have a large fishload so my nitrates were also very low.  The problem is dinoflagellates have been shown to grow quite well in a low nutrient environment while other things do not.

2.  Low biodiveristy.  I have a hypothesis that in my case the chemiclean not only killed the cyanobacteria, but that it killed some other biodiversity in my tank.  Combined with the fact that I had low nutrients and then used chemiclean, I think I set up the perfect storm to let the dinoflagellates that were in my tank bloom.   There is one other connection I see when reading reports that affect biodiveristy.  Many hobbyist now use dry rock as opposed to live rock when setting up their aquairums for the first time.   The dry rock is "dead" when it enter the tank for the first time and slowly grows life, but only life that the hobbyist wants.  If we buy live rock we may be putting unwanted hitchhikers in our tank.   However the live rock is going to have a lot of biodiveristy.  I chose to use dry rock and I can argue that this may have been one more factor to start my bloom.

STEP 2:  TREATMENT PLAN

I did not really think through a treatment plan, I just started treating with anything that I saw worked for others.  I was getting desperate.   Here is what I did and what I learned in the process.  Those in green I feel had a very positive outcome in the end for my tank (amphidinium) and those in red not so much.

1.  Raise nutrients (nitrates and phosphates):  This is the first solution you will find on the forum about how to treat dinoflagellates.  It is counter intuitive to every thing you know and are taught, because dinos can use phosphate and nitrate to grow too.  However they seem bad at competing with other algae.  So this is step one of trying to get biodiversity back in the tank.  First I took my algae scrubber and GFO offline.  I stopped doing any water changes as I also did not want to replace used up micronutrients s or decrease the nutrients I was trying to raise.   I was targeting 0.10 ppm phosphate and 5-8 ppm nitrate.  To raise phosphates I added Seachem Flourish (phosphorus) and to raise nitrates I used spectracide stump remover (potassium nitrate).

Mix 1 part ro/di (1 us cup) with 1 part stump remover granules (1 tbsp). After I made a solution I did not need to add more that 5 -10 mL at a time to get an increase in nitrates.

 

 

This one is already in liquid form.   Again it took very little to raise phosphate for me.  However you need to keep measuring your nitrates and phosphates as it will take a couple weeks to stabilize.  Once you add them, they will get used up quickly.

 

 

I used a Hanna phosphorous checker to measure phosphates and the Seachem nitrates kit for nitrates. 

 



2.  Run Carbon:  I was already running carbon, but I started to change it weekly.   Even with carbon running I had a die off, but I am sure the carbon saved some of my fish and snails.

3.   Siphoning the sand:   I seemed to only have these things in the sand so i started siphoning the sand.  I ran the water through a filter sock and dumped the water back in the tank.   I may have slowed them down a little, but they just came right back.   I slowly stopped even trying this method. 

4.  3 day Blackout and hydrogen peroxide:  A guy at the LFS told me a three day black out might work along with adding hydrogen peroxide.   I had just started dosing nutrients and thought this might be worth trying.   You will see this method to control other algae blooms with success.  the idea is you cover you tank with blankets for 3 days.   The fish and coral will be just fine.  During that time and for a couple of weeks after I added hydrogen peroxide at the rate of 1 mL per 10 gallons of water.   The verdict is this did not work at all.  After the lights came on, everything looked pretty good, but the dinos immediately came back with a vengeance!

On a side note, I did some tests under the microscope and added hydrogen peroxide to a sample of my dinos.  They almost instantly died.    I just think that the amount of hydrogen peroxide I was adding to the tank was not strong enough to hurt their overall high population and any higher can start to hurt your coral.  Also the type of dinos I had were probably protected by the sand. 

5.   UV Sterilizer:  There are many reports that a UV sterilizer will work.  Many of the dinoflagellates will swim in the water column at night and the UV sterilizer will work.   Since amphidinium stays in the sand bed there are many reports that the UV will not help there, but I tried it anyway.  I bought a Jebao 55W UV sterilizer and hooked it up.  No luck for me with amphidinium.   However if you have the other types of dinos this seems to be a solution that is pretty dependable as long as you by one that is sized right.   Recommendation is at least 1 watt per 3 gallons.   I also plumbed this directly in the tank.  While it did not help me, for those species that it does work it seems having the pump directly in your display is better than in your refugium.   Again this did not work for me, but I put it yellow because I am certain its works on certain strains. 

--I PAUSED IN TREATMENTS TO RE-ACCESS  --

I had been raising nutrients for almost a month and if you do this you will go through a ugly phase.  I started growing green hair algae on my rocks and glass.  The dinos also got much worse.  If you go through this then I can say this is a good thing.   It did get to the point that it was starting to cover my coral in places so I would take a toothbrush and give these places a good cleaning. 

I finally hit a point after a month and half of dosing nitrates and phosphates where the tank looked awful.  Dinos and other algae were everywhere on the glass, sandbed, and rocks.   I got fed up with the way it looked and took a toothbrush to everything.  This actually increased my phosphates and nitrates even more.    My phosphates got as high as 0.20 ppm and my nitrates where 8-10 ppm.   I did this cleaning routine every other day for about two weeks and I them I hit a point where the algae did not start growing back and while the dinos were there, they did seem to be getting worse.   It was kinda crazy how everything just stopped growing.   I probably hit some limiting factor in the tank.  Many think this is iron, but maybe it is other things as well?  Something gets used up and dinos and algae alike do not grow as fast.   By the way I was not doing any water changes in this two month period either to replenish anything.

The good news is nothing was getting worse, but they were still there when I looked under scope.

5.  Add Biodiveristy:  After things got really ugly and I cleaned off everything, things were not getting worse, but not fully improving either.   I then also tried other ways to increase biodiversity.  I bought a bunch of FIJI mud (from BRS) and added that to the bottom of my refugium.  I bought a large piece of live rock and added that to my tank.  I bought 15 lbs of GARG grunge (course live sand) and added that directly over my sand.   I covered as much of the sand bed as I could with a thin layer.  Link: www.garf.org  I really feel like this garf grunge had a huge impact!!

5.  Silica dosing:  The last thing I tried was based on a paper someone had found on the forums.   It seems that silica has been used to initiate a diatom bloom and help out compete the dinoflagellates.  At this point things were doing better but again dinos were not completely gone.  Most samples still showed some in the sand, although much left after the garf grunge.  This silicate dosing was a strategy that seems like it is the most geared towards amphidinium since it stays in the sand. 

The paper is this one:  https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0044848602003733

I bought some silicate and started adding.   I did not do any calculations.  I just added 10-15 drops per day to my 125 gallon until I saw a diatom bloom. 

After about 2 weeks I got a good diatom bloom.  Everything got covered in brown including the sand, the glass and the rocks.   I was worried I actually had diatoms again, but I took a sample to see what was going on.

This time I had rice shaped diatoms and not dinoflagellates!   I still could find some dinos here and there but not like it was.   It would be just one cell instead of hundreds and I really had to take a lot of samples to find them.

I stopped dosing silicate and let the diatoms run their course.  Even after a month of no dosing I still have diatoms in spots, but the overall bloom is gone.   I went back to water changes, and still the dinoflagellates did not re-bloom.  At this point I know I at least won the battle.

The only thing I have noticed is whatever limiting factor hit to get stuff to stop growing I think is still a limiting factor.  I still have no algae growth in my main tank even with high nitrates and phosphates.   I am sending a water sample to ATI just to see how my water looks after all this.


Things I did not try:

1.  For amphidinium some people slowly remove all their sand.  I wanted to try everything before going this route, but there has been some success stories.

2. There is one product that is supposed to help with Dinos called DINO-X.   I again was only going to use this as a last report.  Just going by reports only it seems hit or miss and there are some reports of it hurting coral.   I have no direct experience with this one.

LESSONS LEARNED

1.  Make sure you ID what you are fighting.  It really makes a difference in how you will treat and will make sure you don't make things worse.

2.  I will never run a ultra low phosphate and nitrate tank again.   In fact my phosphates stay between 0.10 and 0.15 and my nitrates are over 4.   I added chaeto to my refugium and all the algae seems to grow down there now.  I do not have any algae problems in the main display.  Everything tells you to get those phosphates to 0.  Nope.  I will never do that again nor will I ever recommend it.   One bout of dinos and you will change your tune quickly.

3.  Use the resources out there and share your experiences.  There is an unbelievable community that i have so much to thank for and I hope my story can help someone else in turn. 


HAPPY REEFING!  AND DON'T GIVE UP!