Thanks jimmy for all your help. The LFS tested my water and said my solids were a little high, so i ordered a new DI. (seems like you might be dead on. What do you do to treat cyno??
The tank is about 6 months old but i had a major crash, so lets call 3 months old.
Happy to help (or at least try
)
From an earlier post;
"Best bets for fighting cyano are maintaining good flow, heavy skimming, and being careful of nutrient import (not overfeeding, good make up water...). Running GFO will also help (see below)."
Fighting cyano is much like most other nusiance algaes (with the exception of diatoms and dinoflagellates, IIRC neither of which is actually an algae). The good thing about cyano is that it also often kind of cycles through and you see less and less of it over time, though most reef tanks have at least a little somewhere.
Limit nutrients and starve it out. Nitrate and phosphate are the key limiting nutrients. Conventional reefing wisdom will point you to phosphate as the easiest/best limiting factor, though there was a reccent thread here about doing it the other way around and focusing on nitrate. The simple summary is phosphate needs to be really low in a reef or your corals suffer, so you might as well just deal with that.
Traditionally phosphate was quite a challenge to deal with in a reef because the only available way to remove it other than water changes and skimming (to remove waste before it gets broken down into phosphate and other bad things) was to use aluminum based removers which could/did have some nasty side effects. Several yrs ago someone figured out that GFO was usable and effective, now many / most reefers are running it to keep phosphate in check. See this link for a brand of GFO and a link to an affordable reactor to run it in;
http://www.marinedepot.com/ps_searchItem.aspx?IdCategory=&SearchText=phosban&parsed=1
*BTW, I have seen that reactor and the media at basically the same prices locally, you don't need to order it.
Other than GFO, of course heavy skimming is great for pulling waste out before it breaks down. If you have a good skimmer, clean it often and keep it tuned. If you don't have a good skimmer, well, that's one of the most critical investments in a reef IMO. (Good news, lots of good quality skimmers come and go in the for sale forums here for good prices).
Also, increasing water flow is often reccomended for battling cyano. IMO that doesn't deal with the primary problem of excess nutrients, but it seems to annoy the cyano so it doesn't thrive (though I worry that this approach will then lead to more difficult nusaince algaes taking over, but that's just a hunch).
Hang in there, cyano is annoying and ugly, but relatively harmless most of the time. We've all had it and most of us always will have a little.
jk
