Green algae with refugium?

I don't know why I am still getting algae growth in my main tank when my refugium is overgrown with caulerpa, red macro, and chaeto. I recently moved my 40 gallon into a 54 gallon corner tank about 2 weeks ago, and I am starting to get green slime algae on my glass, my sand as well as on my brand new LR. I bumped up my lights from 150W T5s to a 150W MH with 100W actinics. My light cycle is 12 hours with the actinics running an hour before and an hour after the MH is on. My return from the fuge is running at about 300 GPH.


As you can see my fuge is loaded with green stuff.



Why am I still getting algae? Is my cycle too long, could it be that I need more return flow? All of my livestock is doing fantastic. I have about 10 astreas, 5 nessarius, 2 mexican turbos and an overwhelmind abundance of hermits.

Thanks,

Eli

 

Are you saying that you have your lights on for 12 hours? If so this is probably your issue. I was running my lights too much and I had the wierd slime algae. When I cut it back to 8 hrs, no more algae. That was the only thing that changed, so I have to assume this was the problem. good luck

 

Ill try a 10 hr cycle with the MH on for 8 then. Thx

 

Slow down the water out of the refugium, my return on mine is about 3-4 gallons per hour.

Gin

 

My refugium is my filter, do you think 3 or 4 gph would be enough to adequately filter my tank?

 

No it wouldn't. You have chaeto in there, so you need the flow that you are using. The fact that your macro algae is doing very well shows that your flow is fine. I think the fact that you recently changed from a 40 to a 54 is your problem.

I think cutting the lights back by 2 hours will help, as well as maybe adding some more snails (you did increase the size of the tank by about 30% so you may want to add 30% more snails).

 

Green slime is usually indicative of a cyanobacteria bloom, not an algae bloom.

 

Your refugium is to pretty and clean cut the flow to 1xwhat ever the total is of the water volume of the fuge is per Hr. And are you tossing out any algae ? Thats how they work nothing pretty just I see lots of planted Caulerpa's in there and a little cheado . A fuge is never a stand alone filtration system where is the skimmer and carbon and what skimmer if there is one do you use ?

 

It also looks like you have some red slime algae in the regugium, this would go with amcarrigs post and you may want to find the source casuing this, usually water params and also may be caused by your move "cycling" the tank again.

 

Red slime (cyanobacteria) in the refugium is fine actually. The dirtier a refugium, the better IME