Hi everyone-- I just wanted to share this with you all incase someone else ever has a similar problem (this is a long post.. so grab some coffee before you sit down to read this!)
If you remember around thanksgiving I posted about this
brown algae in the water that clouded the water up when the lights came on and then got better after a couple hours. Well it went away for whatever reason, but this weekend started again.. VERY BAD.
I did a lot of reading and came to the conclusion that the problem was dinoflagelates (however you spell that!) So first, let me give you some background.. My tank is 5 months old.. with a DSB, bunch of live rock, and currently houses a large cleanup crew, 2 percs, and a few mushrooms and polyps growing on the LR. The mushrooms and polyps started to look BAD whenever this brown junk would appear. The fish looked OK but didn't seem as active.. oh and all the water params (ammonia, nitrites, etc) were fine. needless to say I started getting a little frustrated and a little bit freaked out!
Anyway, that was Saturday.. I now have the problem solved.. I don't know what specifically did the trick.. but here is all the methods I gathered from different boards...
-First thing I thought was.. water change.. I did a 20% which I'm sure helped all the creatures, but I later read it would not help eliminate the dino problem.
-Monday I didn't run the lights at all, and Tuesday I only ran them for 2 hours. They are on normal schedule today. Since I don't have any corals yet other then the LR stuff... this was easier to do, but I kept an eye on everything anyway.
-I've been running carbon since Saturday.. (change it every other day cause this junk clogs it up fast).. I will probably continue for the rest of the week just to be safe.
-I gave all the plumbing and especially my skimmer a very good cleaning. I noticed that my skimmer hadn't been as efficient and the cleaning got it running full-blast again.
-I dripped kalk at night. Some people talked about dripping it extra-fast to bring the PH up to 8.6, hindering the growth of the dinos. Well, I wasn't brave enough to do that, but I kept up with my normal drip rate.
-I replenished my supply of nassarious snails.
-I also read that a lot of people would get the sand activator/reef critter stuff from IPSF. I had seeded my DSB with some live sand originally and my tank is crawling with little bugs and critters.. so I didn't do this.
-Also, maybe unrelated but I installed a RO/DI last week and have started using that instead of Cleveland tap water (which isn't terribly bad but still gave me a fair amount of hair algae to deal with)
Again, I don't know if something specific did the trick, but after a few days, my tank went from being full of nasty brown snot-like stuff to nearly clear. The fish look healthy again and the shrooms and polyps look a little POd but generally OK.
If it wasn't for the wealth of information on this board.. I am confident that this may very well have ended in disaster! Thank you!!
Hopefully this will help someone else some day.
-John
