Mobile Bay Reef Keepers

water changes just wont work.... my tank is doing good looking good and everything is good calcium is 480... nitrate-40 phos... like a 2 waterchanges wont fix it skimmer is doing its thing filter sock gets cleaned every few days... nothing is dead alge isnt even growing on the front glass over the rate of a small film in a weeks time i dont know what to do? do i leave it or what. about a month ago i had a butterfly get hungry and eat a carpet and start nipping other softies i offed his head and tossed the dead coral got the water looking better now its back to crap what can i do i change 5gal a week in a 90gal system and i do a cleanout of 25gal every month or when it looks bad... help.

Keep it up, it should eventually improve.

ran across a scrubber... said to be so good that i can do away with my skimmer anyone ever used one? it consist of a waterfall a screen and vho lights to inhibit the growth of alge on the screen the alge will move from the tank to the screen and will filter the water as it grows reducing n&p to 0.??? im going to try it just for $#!t5 and giggles... maybe it will turn out a hit and become a new trend?

Not a new trend at all, pretty old idea. Not many people want to bother with it, there are a few pitfalls to that method IMO. I don't know of any serious systems that have used one long-term. You could put some cheato in your refugium, lots of folks do that with good results.

What base water are you using for your water changes, Tap, RO, RODI? Or are you buying it from a store?

AuroraDrvr wrote:What base water are you using for your water changes, Tap, RO, RODI? Or are you buying it from a store?

im getting ro from walmart it is just as pure as the crap from b&b at half the cost... .27 cent a gallon. culligan water theres a few people on here that use it also.

You need algal growth somewhere, be it a refugium, scrubber, etc. A bit of fast growing algae will reduce nitrate and phosphate pretty significantly. My little 25g gets 4 cubes of food daily plus two feedings with pellets--neither the nitrate or phosphate are measurable. It just depends on the amount of growth you push.

my back wall is green... i have a few select rocks that are GREEN GREEN but im picking up a 20long baffeled tonight i hope and i got spaghetti and caulerpa macro to put in it. ill also have the 2 t-5's on it cool thing beaver gave me the spaghetti and it was loaded with about 20 brittle stars just big enough they wont get sucked up...

You may not have enough growth or it may not be growing efficiently enough. Then again, you don't really want to encourage growth in a display, either. I think if you drive photosynthesis enough in your refugium that you will be adding, you will see better results in the display. The idea is to give the algae a more appropriate or preferable place to grow, whether it is micro- or macroalgae. For the space, a scrubber is the most efficient. But if you don't like the idea of using a scrubber, then a good refugium with decent light will certainly help. When I had my scrubber set up on my older tank, it dropped both nitrate and phosphate to undetectable levels, even with feeding large amounts of food (though I'm now feeding the same amount in a tank with less than half the water volume). People tend to trash them, but they actually do work and are perfectly viable forms of filtration. They just aren't for everyone, though. If you are interested and want to learn more, see my thread that I made about my older one.

soooo scrubber or refugium....... grrrrr i like the refugium just for the fact that it looks cool it gives my reef pods a place to hang and well it looks frickin awsome... complexity is key in a reef it makes me feel smart... but the scrubber i feel will do a much much better job of cleaning up my tank... if i had room... i could do all 3!!! bigger tank! make that 3 excuses for my wife to let me get a bigger tank... i could run a scrubber a skimmer and a refugium... and realy over crowd my tank with more crap i dont need but if feeds my addiction to spend every leftover portion of my paycheck... hehe man im getting alittle annoying on mbrk huh i need a life.... excuse... i have a baby thats 5 weeks so i have nothing better to do on my offdays than sit and babble on about nothing on mbrk... by the way im piecing togather a bunch of 10gal fo's to give away to people that will take an interest in the hobby kind of like a stimulous maybe? anyone have any junk to throw in?