Please help me solve my GHA problem for K+

I haven't really considered any other algaes since cheato does so good, and is easy... I only had gracileria because I was thinking about getting a tang one day. If I do get a tang, I'll start growing it again.

 

OK, posting late tonight after doing my weekly water change...

I was turkey basting the GHA tonight and noticed that much of it has turned white and is blowing off easily with the baster. I think this is a good sign. Did a 15% water change and making more water to do another 15% change tomorrow... keeping my mag levels @1700 for now. Let's hope for the best!

It may turn out that I need to find a home for the sea hare sooner than later... too bad b/c I was starting to grow very fond of him/her!

 

Personally, I would get a strong powerhead and blow out your rocks and see what comes out. Turkey basting isn't enough. With your returns going across the surface, and a couple of power heads... my guess is that you are not providing enough flow to clean out your rocks.

Do you have a 90g.... I can't belive you keep 50 hermits alive. I have about 15 hermits in my 90g, with a few turbos. 10 Nasarius. Everyone seems happy. I feed 3 cubes a day and I have never had any algae.

I run my returns staight down the back of my tank. I kept my rock open to allow flow. Most of it is off the sand bed. I have a MP40 providing flow, and a K3 pointed at the back glass. I could drop all three cubes in the back of my tank and all of it would come shooting out my rocks. I have taken a power head to my rock many times and nothing comes out.

Light is light and that really does not matter. We try to give our tanks enough light to simulate daytime. Bottom line is this....if you have algae, you have excess nutrients. If you have GHA and you throw away bucketts of cheato.... you have have enough nutrients to support that growth. A ton of nitrates and phosphates. You test zero because it is being taken up as soon as it is produced, but the production is big. If you are only feeding one cube a day, then it isn't that. My guess is that a lot of waste has built up and is only now showing itself.

Running GFO will reduce PO4 and limit growth. That is one way to reduce growth, but it does not reduce nitrates. Turning off lights does kill algae, but it does not reduce nutrients. It just releases them back. Water changes, GFO, macro algae, all reduce nutrients.

Also, anything eating algae is not reducing nutrients, it is just borrowing them. Just about every organisim only processes about 20% of the food it consumes. The other 80% is nothing but food for the next guy down the chain. At the end it is all processed back to the core nutrients.....then taken back up by something else and started over again.

Reduce nutrients and you will limit growth.

 

It's a 120 Gallon... my CUC consists of the following:

~35-40 very small blue hermits
~10 scarlet hermits
2 trochus snails
bunch of stomatella
1 coral banded shrimp
3 peppermint shrimp
4 emerald green crabs
1 serpent sea star
1 pink pincushion urchin
1 sea hare
thousands of pods and various worms

My 9 fish are:
2 bar gobies
1 dart goby
1 YW goby
1 YC Goby
1 Firefish Goby
1 Sixline Wrasse
1 mandarin dragonet
1 lemonpeel angel

My flow if calculated by the pump's ratings is a total of 4200 GPH. I figure it's probably more like 3500 GPH in actuality. That's still about 30x the tank volume per hour. I can't see adding anymore powerheads, but I can understand what you mean about directing the flow differently.

Tomorrow I will work on a way to direct more flow through the rocks.

thanks!

 

Ya, I think you have enough flow for your corals, but look into the flow through your rocks and what you have hiding in there.