Cyano tips

I don’t think it’s the cyclopeeze and not sure why everyone is so quick to point the finger there. I think I would be tempted to do the same but you are no beginner to this hobby and I doubt you would over feed – much less continue to use a food product your inhabitants are not eating. If the food product is chocked full of nitrates and phosphates (as many are) I again doubt it will cause a bacteria outbreak in a tank of your size. You would need to have overfeed and let the excess lay in the DT and accumulate.

I like the steps you have taken thus far, you mentioned that flow is not an issue – are you certain all pumps and power heads are functioning correctly?

I keep cyano in my fuge been some in there fore a long, long time. You may want to consider removing some from your DT and placing it in your fuge. You mentioned “killing spores” with chemi-clean. I run Chemi-Clean and Purigen 24/7 and my fuge still has cyano in it. So I am not sure that you can kill spores sort of speak – but I don’t know anything on the subject, just speculating based on my own setup.

The only other thing I would question is your skimmer production – is it functioning as it should (as it has in the past). Reduced skimmer production causing an increase in DOC’s could be coincidental with the feeding of cylopeeze.

 

It's strange because I just got a cyano outbreak and I also just started using cyclopeeze but I also had a skimmer malfunction in there too so I cant only point the finger there.

 

The cyclopeeze was the only change. My skimmer has not changed skimmate production. I did find a rock of xenia that was decaying slowing in my fuge. I removed that today.

I use to have cyano in my fuge, but when I upgraded from a Tunce 635gph pump to an eheim 1262, the cyano went away because my flow through the sump doubled. This was about 3 months ago.

M nitrates keep going up to about 15ppm no matter what I do. GHA is all over the fuge and in my overflow.

My feeding routine is a cube of mysis a day due to the number of fish and species of fish I have. I used cyclopeeze every other day for about 2 weeks before the cyano started. I figured what the fish did not eat the corals would.

There will be another 30-35 gallon waterchange this weekend.

 

if I may put in my 2 cents...
sounds like the typical buildup of DOC. You stated that you have nitrate that hangs at 15ppm which also points to this.
Have you tried manual removal of the GHA... does it grow back if removed?

first question: what skimmer do you have?
second: what is your typical pH

 

When i remove the GHA it grows back in a few days.

1) swc extrem 160 cone
2) pH is normally 8.2-8.4. dKH ranges from 9-10.

How should I deal with the DOC?

 

Well your skimmer seems like it should be okay... however if you have a super high bioload then theres a chance it might not be able to keep up.

Generally the higher your ORP is, the faster your DOC are broken down. Since your GHA is growing back with the use of RODI (i assume no phosphates added here), this tells me that your ORP is not drastically low... however on the lower side.
My recommendations to incerase ORP are: (in no particular order)
-get a larger skimmer (or try supplying it with fresh air from outside first)
-put in a fuge with macros and strong lighting
-carbon dose
-run a media reactor with something for phosphates or DOC in it

As carbon dosing is the easiest, it can also increase your cyano if done wrong. There is a very fine line between the increase in water column bacteria cultures pulling out the DOC supplied by excess feeding... and between the carbon source actually supplying enough food to fuel excessive growth of cyano. The second situation is where people add too much vodka without knowing it and report seeing cyano break out from the vodka.

 

I would say my bioload is on the high end, but I don't fed as much as I used to. I think my main issue in causing this was my fish not eating all the cyclop-eeze and leaving it to decay. My fish are 1 3" yellow tang, 1 2" blue hippo, 2 true percs, 2 lyretail anthias, 3 green chromis, 1 purple firefish, 1 royal gramma, 1 cleaner wrasse. I want to remove the chromis, but I doubt there is a practical way to go about that.

I have a 10 gallon fuge that has 21 mangroves and used to have a ball of cheato in it. I removed the ball two nights ago due to it being covered in GHA. Last night I noticed GHA browning out in the fuge and a huge layer of sediment on the fuge bottom. I spent about an hour and a half cleaning the fuge bottom. I kept filling the fuge and return with clean tap water and pumping it back out. This took about 8 times to get the water from brown and green to clear. I know cleaning the algae in the fuge wasn't the best thing to do, but i had to in order to get the muck off the bottom. I will be grabbing more cheato tonight.

I am a firm believer that vodka belongs in the body and not in my tank. However, I have been thinking about carbon dosing with ecobak and buying two NextReef MR1 reactors to daisy chain together, but the funds just aren't there right now for those things.

I also rarely do water changes, but due to the cyano, I will start doing them every other week. I did a 10 gallon water change last night due to cleaning the muck out of the fuge. I will test my water tonight.