Please help...

[Lareina&Mike]

Hi all,

I would really appreciate some help. My husband has looked up a million things and tried a million things and talked to a million guys at the local fish store and none of the ideas anyone has given us has helped. So now I'm here, asking for help from the gurus instead of relying on my husband to eventually find out what's up...

Our fish tank looks like this:

This brown stuff has come and went away a little bit for a time but then came back just as strong as it once was... I have no clue what to do and my husband is slowly giving up the fight with it at all so now, it's my turn to jump in and try to figure something out.

Any ideas you can give me as to what it is and what we can do about it would be appreciated. My husband has gotten so frustrated with it that he's now contemplating selling our fish entirely and it annoys me to no end that we put so much money into this and now he's just done...

Please help so we can love our fish tank again!

Lareina

P.S. It seemed to arrive shortly after adding some new sand to the tank.

[Wingin' It]

it's algae (I think) get yourself a goby and it'll sift through all of it and make it clean again. If you don't have any snails, i'd put some in too to help stir up the sand.

what do you have in there for flow/powerheads?

[bryancatfish]

you might want to try upping the flow around the tank as well as using a phosphate remover to get rid of the excess nutrients in the water. are you using tap water for your water hanges? if so the city water table has some extra goodies in it at this time of year. that could also be a part of the problem. snails and crabs are an easy way to keep it down as well. i would really try the phosphate remover though. i think with that and a couple of powerheads and a sand sifting goby it should get rid of most of it if not all of it.

hope this helps, best of luck

[bryancatfish]

having the tank that close to the window cant be helping either. just a thought.

[Crystal]

What size of tank and how old is it? Marine tanks aren't truly stablized until they are about a year old or more.

Excess nutrients and lack of flow are the usual culprits for that type of algae.

Add carbon and GFO or, even better, if possible add a sump or a hang-on refugium and grow macro algae to absorb the nutrients.

10x flow is a basic figure and can be pushed higher. I prefer powerheads such as the Hydor Koralia, as they can be directed easily.

If you use tap water, get an RO or RO/DI unit, bryancatfish is right, our tap water isn't good for marine. Heavy in certain minerals, they tend to build up in the tank, though refugiums with macro algae tend to help. I would never do a marine tank without RO water.

If you feed frozen, rinse the food in water first to be rid of the "juices" which are high in phosphates. Feed only as much as you fish can eat - I feed mine pellet by pellet, so nothing is left over.

Snails will help, I never really liked hermits though, as they often killed the snails (certain types are worse than others).

Good luck.

Edited April 13, 2010 by Crystal

[FishyFishy!]

It will definatly benefit from being away from direct sunlight (I have actually experimented with this) the tank I put close to the window grew fully covered over with algae in 26 days... when I changed locations... it has yet to have any major algae in 30 days.

Buy a reverse osmosis water purifier for all water changes to remove all of this city's crappy water chemicals.

Add more flow to the aquarium, and some helpful little algae cleaners such as crabs, snail, shrimp or gobies etc etc.

Simple steps to begin with.

[MMAX]

What can I say that hasn't been said already? Get a good test kit and test for phosphates, Phosban reactors aren't really that expensive. Do a water change with RO/DI water, cut back your photo period and keep the tank out of direct sunlight. Get some kind of sand sifters but DO NOT buy a sand sifting star. An orange spot sand sifting goby will do wonders for you.