ATS for 120 Reef

[SantaMonica]

I've been through this before, after killing large amounts of things one way or another.

You don't want to cut photo period in a display; that just puts more nutrients into the water, which is what hurts corals and caused even darker scrubber growth. Adding more CUC causes the same thing. If anything, increase the period. You want the nuisance algae / periphyton to stay alive and grow in the display, so as to absorb nutrients. And stop all feeding.

Manually removing nuisance algae will work. Waterchange, GFO, Polyfilter too. Even extra bulbs on the scrubber, or a temporary extra scrubber. If the scrubber is black, you can go to 24 hour lighting and clean it as soon as the screen holes get covered up.

Whatever is decaying is big and will probably last a few weeks. Now would be a good time to vacuum / blow off the display, especially behind the rocks. And make sure nothing is rotting in the sump.

[Floyd R Turbo]

I just discovered something else that may or may not have contributed, when I took the scrubber off and changed the lamps, I bumped the timer over ride switch to "ON" so it's been on 24/7 for the past 5 days. I just fixed it. The growth wasn't black today when I cleaned it, just lots of dinos/diatoms and little GHA, but there was some. The bubble-blocker was packed with dinos and overflowing. I sucked out about 3 gallons of water & dinos using airline tubing and then mixed up some fresh RC and added some Alk to it to try to boost the pH.

I'll try upping the photoperiod like you said (seem opposite to everything I've read, why is that?) I wish I could figure out what is so big that it is decaying, all the fish are accounted for and no missing big corals...maybe a group of snails bit the dust or something.

[Floyd R Turbo]

Also no sump, top of tank scrubber with not so good light blocking, so the tank is essentially under strong moonlight at night.

[SantaMonica]

Well.

The 24 hour thing is the answer. You have been losing filtering over the past 5 days. Not increasing nutrients.

Still, the things I mentioned will bring nutrients back down. Light that is shining on autotrophs (algae, periphyton) cause them to consume nutrients. Your rocks are covered in periphyton; that's why they are not white. So more light = less nutrients.

A scrubber cleaning, with fixed timer, should have things back in a a few days (since there is no dying thing).

[Floyd R Turbo]

The dinos showed up before that happened though, unless the switch has been "ON" for longer than that. Hard to say now. I had the timer set on an odd cycle, 12 on, 3 off, 3 on, 3 off, so the tank had a solid downtime at night since the top-of-tank was lighting up the whole tank (not a lot, but enough IMO). It was working just fine, but I switched it to 18/6 reverse cycle just in case.

[Floyd R Turbo]

Should I still extend the photoperiod on the DT, or leave it as is? It's an 8 lamp 48" T5HO with 4 ATI Blue+ on the first branch that runs 12:30pm-9:30pm and 2 ATI Purple +, one ATI Blue + and one Giesmann Aquablue on the other branch that runs 1:30pm-8:30pm.

Also should I still discontinue all feeding and for how long?

According to this http://reefkeeping.com/issues/2006-11/rhf/index.php dinos suck up the nutrients quickly, which I assume is why they suggest a shortened photoperiod. But I suppose all of that is written without factoring in an algae scrubber. Since dinos are photosynthetic plankton essentially, it would seem logical that the algae scrubber will out-compete them eventually. With all the snotty slime on the screen, it almost seems like the scrubber gave them a place to grow, because the 1L bottle with the bio-balls in it that I use to reduce bubbles - look in this video at 5:30 and you'll get a glimpse of it http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrNvqtk7t18 - was clogged with dinos and was overflowing into the outer box of the scrubber, not a lot, but it has never done that before since I've had this set up. The screen was covered in brown slime that easily washed away, leaving some red turf and GHA which I only lightly scraped, leaving plenty on there.

The war coral did not open up after lights out again last night, but a few of the others did slightly. Still could see bubbles held by dinos everywhere in the tank, even after 2 passes of siphoning with the airhose, and the birdsnest seems like a perfect snagging point, strings of dinos all over it, plus it's at the highest point of the tank which probably isn't helping it.

If I wasn't moving this tank again (back to the dentist's office) in a couple months when the new tank comes in, I would re-do the area around the scrubber pump and make it an overflow box with an area where I can put some mechanical and chemical filtration media and get some surface skimming. If this doesn't go away soon, that might be the next step.

[SantaMonica]

The display can only be overdriven temporarily, or the corals suffer. Choose what you want: Corals or dino's.

Yes dino's are fast. A shorter period negates this, and puts nutreints back into the water where it hurts corals. Since your scrubber was not filtering, the dinos could grow anywhere. Your P was probably 1.0. That's how fast the scrubber was consuming P. When consuming stops, it backs up quick.

You could also put an ounce of vodka in. Will bring the P right down.

[Floyd R Turbo]

Well that's the odd thing. On Monday, 4 days after cleaning and all of that with 24 hr lighting, possibly a week more than that, the PO4 was 0.02, so it had dropped.

Everything looks better today. Minimal siphoning of dinos needed. polyps extended at right now. No feeding today, DT lights 12 hrs (blues) & 10 hrs (others).

[Floyd R Turbo]

A full week with the DT lights on 12/10 and ATS 18/6 reverse cycle and dinos are completely eradicated. Corals are fine, except the hammers took a beating - one head on the 10 head one is about 1/2 gone.

I couldn't clean the scrubber on day 7 so went to day 8 (yesterday), I did a thorough cleaning of the screen, took a stiff brush to it gently and got all the red algae off. It was probably the deepest cleaning I have ever done on the screen, but I wanted to see if the frogspawns and hammers would open back up, and they did. By the time I got home today, one of the frogspawns was really opened up, the other about 1/2 way, and the hammers started to recover and open up.

Going to test right now...

[Floyd R Turbo]

Just an update since I haven't posted one in a while:

The dino outbreak seems under control. The problems were flow related I believe, the power heads were all gummed up and my scrubber intake system does not skim the surface. So cleaning the PHs and re-directing them seems to have helped. Due to the top-of-tank setup without light blocking, I am getting some red cyano growth but it is not rampant, I have had to siphon it off twice over a month.

The new tank arrived a few weeks ago and we put it up on the stand where it has been sitting while I complete the sump

Here is the sump, which is now done:











This is really my first major acrylic project and I have to say that all the studying and prep work I did has paid off 100%. This sump is made for 3000GPH of flow and the existing scrubber will span the sump, will have a 1.5" pipe drain system that should be dead silent and lead into a bubble diffuser that sits inside the sump.

I'll post a few shots of the new tank when I stop up there next, it is a 144 Miracles 66Lx21Wx24H (actual capacity 125) with a notched end and external overflow box for a 3-pipe Beananimal silent and fail-safe drain system, a Reefflo Dart external return pump, and the scrubber will be fed with a Mag5. I decided to do a pump-fed scrubber for a few reasons, first being that I didn't want to deal with balancing the flow to the scrubber, and second since I've been running it pump fed on the temp setup I guess I prefer that method now. Also since the tank will have an open weir at one end, which will have almost an inch of flow over the top of it, there is a much greater chance for a fish riding the pipe and I wanted the sump to be a safe haven in that case.

The scrubber pump will set in the intake chamber so it will need to be shielded to prevent any buddies getting sucked onto the intake. Then the intake for the return pump will have another layer of shielding, both of these likely a section of #10 plastic canvas.

The system I came up with for retrofitting the existing scrubber in necessitated some creative engineering. The head room above the sump to the underside of the stand was exactly enough to be able to remove the inner scrubber box, but there's not enough room for the male/female PVC drain fittings. This turns out to be just fine. What i have discovered with the top-of-tank arrangement (I have one drain in, the other out that drops into bio-balls above the tank) is that the system is very silent when there's no drain plumbing to create the sucking sound. So I am going to have a piece of 1.5" PVC pipe positioned directly below the holes in the inner box, one into a 90 and a 19" long pipe that meets up with a tee that is below the other hole, and both will drain into the bubble diffuser contraption I came up with last night (on paper).

Since I will have to re-plumb the scrubber pipe to make everything fit, I am going to cut the slot tube the RIGHT way (yes, it still has remnants of crosscuts, I've been doing it wrong this WHOLE TIME) and probably shorten the width of the screen slightly (like 1/2" total, maybe).

And of course, I have to move all the LR and inhabitants.....