why?

For 3 years I had 90gal. reef tank. Sand was clean and white. Then 3 months ago I upgraded to 125g. Like everybody suggested I used only couple cups old sand and bought 80 pounds new aragonite. Everything from 90 was thansfered, included 150 pounds of live rock.After 4 weeks in my new tank i started get algae. Why? What can be the reason? Salnity-1.024 nitrate-5.0 nitrite-0 amonia-0 PH-8.2 phosfate-0.1 alkalinity-5mq/l witch is like 13 kh.Looks great to me.So why algae. I feed every other day .5 fishes in the tank and lots of corals.Every 2 weeks 25 gal water change <ro>. Please help.I think it is diatoms kind of brown and dark red. I try to put picks but it does not work.

 

most likely because your nitrate is high, you're having an algae bloom. do a water change, maybe 2 this week, and that should help bring the nitrate level down. i just went thru that too, upgraded a 55g to a 120g. the red algae is because of poor water quality, i had a lot of that too.

 

Normal with new sand. Diatoms will go away soon enough.

 

+1 on a diatom bloom, sit tight, will go away on it's own.

 

Just one I could get thru.

 

Really it will go by itself???? I try to scoop it every day but I waist a lot of sand too.It is almost 3 weeks. I bought aragonite instead of playsand to avoid this!!!

 

Nitrate is not even 5.0. that is really low.

 

Ok.... That is one sweet looking coral.

Diatoms are just eating away at what little silicates are in the new sand. Once they are gone, the algae will disappear too. No need to remove it unless it is irritating your corals.

 

Thank you. I hope you are right. I want to show you my tank but I can't get thru with pictures. Something is wrong with my camera.

 

there's all sort of free image resizers available. image resizer - Google Search

Additionally, there's free online photo hosting sites like photobucket.com and you can just put a link in your posts.