Chaeto not growing!

hey, well ive had my two balls of chaeto in my sump for over 2 months now and i bought at lowes a 6500K bulb, now my chaeto is not growing, ive seen how many have to cut it and take some out or sell it, and mine just keeps getting smaller, now i have some small hermit crabs and snails in my fuge as well, what can be the problem for it not growing like "weed" like some people say!

 

I have the exact setup you have and my 3 little golfball sized clumps have now become the size of a football. I use the 6500K light as well, it's a 16W bulb equivalent of 65W. My fuge is about 10G, so it's pretty close to your fuge size. I had to slow my flow through the fuge for it to grow though. My first try at my fuge resulted in no growth and fast die off. When I slowed the rate down, the chaeto has grown quite nicely. For the chaeto to grown, you have to have nitrates for it to feed on, and have normal iron levels as well. I have my light about 2" above the waterline.

 

I just ordered this bulb:
Melevsreef.com - Refugium Bulb

 

mmm well i have a slow flow, and the bulb is 6500K 18W thats equivalent to a 75W, but i have no trace of nitrates! and i prefer to have that than to grow chaeto lol, but what i see is small pieces of chaeto in the substrate, like if something is cutting it in to small pieces! is that a sign of it dying?

 

Die off usually is shown by it draining its chlorophyll and turning white. It will also break apart.

 

I had that same problem and bought the bulb you described, moved the light closer to the water level and Voila! after all this time it finally started growing and is doing great. The odd thing is that now I also have a soft coral growing on the side of the fuge divider, due to location cannot tell if it is a red mushroom, likely, or piece of cabbage leather, which is what it really looks like.:-/

 

spread it out, it may be thickening, also high calcium hurts chaeto

 

the problem i see here is the lack of wattages.

the 65 wattage it means is incandescent which is crap, its less then crap, its not even normal flourescent. you may as well be using candles.

what your using is a compact flourscent bulb of 16 watts lets just go with that.
i would not reccommend growing with no less then 2 wpg. so i would double up on those bulbs.
one of the bulbs wont provide enough light for anything except what is right below it

sorry for my strong worded post i just want to stress how absolutely useless incandescent is for growing any thing

incandescent produces around 15 lumens per watt.
while flourscent produces 60.
a incadescent bulb is 4 times less efficent then any "normal" lighting system on a aquarium.
any wpg suggestion on aquariums sites is based on atleast 60 lumens per watt lighting. on reef tanks is usually based on more efficent lighting

 

i got 65w pcs, that is what you want. you are right, incandescent isn't that great. I like ho whardware stores are like "this bulb is like 100 watts of an outdated inefficient bulb!". Great...they even put that number in big letters...I thought I was scoring some really cheap PCS, to find out they were only 30W when I read the package.