Old system... new issues

[drhyne]

I have an established reef and fish tank. it's a 65g display with a 29g fuge. The system has 2 screens about 10 x 14 that are lit by 2 warm white CF's and 1 red CF. The fuge has macro's and 5 mangroves. Most of the macro's are local Jersey stuff that I use for food for my tangs.

My problems are:

1. Xenia are all but gone despite over feeding. I assume there is nothing I can do.
2. Silt appears to be building up in the display tank. I have to go in with a powerhead every few weeks to clean stuff off. A few months ago I even went to the extreme of getting a Cheap-O pool filter and using that to push-pull all the gunk out one afternoon. I have also added a cucumber to each tank to try and eat the crud!
3. Red and Green algae on the glass. Every day I have to clean my glass off. It gets a thin coating of green that is easily removed. In the corners where I can't reach the green has turned to a rust color. The snail help but never fully clean it. I even tried firing up my old skimmer and never got anything in the cup.
4. Despite having no filters I don't see many pods in the display tank.

This annoys the crap out of me when I go to my LFS and he has Zenia growing like wild fire and ZERO algae while only running a skimmer. What am I doing wrong!?!?!?!

Oh, BTW, all the bad stuff reads 0, Everything else is normal and stable, PH is 8.2, Salt is 1.025 and temp hovers around 77 depending on the humidity. I also dose iodine and Kalk. Water changes are rare.

[SantaMonica]

Your macros are the problem. They grow too slow to do much filtering (and is the reason why fuge's don't filter much compared to scrubbers), but the bigger problem is:

1. Since you don't remove all the macros every week (like you do with a scrubber), the macro cells reach maturity and start self-shading, causing die-off. This puts far more dead particles into the water than scrubbers do, because with a scrubber you remove the algae before it becomes "fully grown" and "self shading". All those dead particles from the macro's, while great food for some things, collects as "silt".

2. Fuge's with macro's act as a mechanical filter, trapping food particles and causing them to rot. These particles settle as silt too.

So it's better to have no macro's at all, and just have an open sump so food can circulate around to the corals again, without getting stuck in the sump. As for the mangroves, they are just for looks; they are no doing any filtering.

Once you get your nutrients fixed (by removing the macros and cleaning out the sump), you can start really feeding more, the way you are able to with a scrubbed tank. If you feed enough, the xenia will live.

The algae on the glass is from the decaying stuff in the sump.

The only pods you'll get from the scrubber will be baby copepods, one week old, the size of white dust. Bigger pods that grow in the sump may get torn up in the pumps.

Your LFS is spending a lot of money to keep his nutrients down; you are not. And his coral will have much less food because of the skimmer. But then again he's not trying to grow corals.

So remove the macro's, and hopefully the mangroves too, and make the sump an open passage for water. Best is to have no sump at all.

[drhyne]

Damn... so no easy fix.

I still need the sump in case we lose power and for all my supporting equipment. I was considering building a scrubber that would fit behind my lights and drain directly back into the display tank. I can then cut the flow to the sump to a trickle.

Is it possible I am just exporting too many nutrients? Like adjusting a skimmer, should I decrease the surface area of the scrubber to get a balance?

[SantaMonica]

Keep the sump, but empty it out and put the scrubber there instead. That's the easiest.

You are not exporting too much if you have algae on the glass every day. When it is working right, you only have to clean once a week, max. Some people go every two weeks.