Aquarium light

Hi all,

I have a 28 gallon bow front salt water aquarium with live rock, sand bed, CUC, yellow Coris wrasse, and 2 clown fish. I am in the process of adding soft coral but I have 2 problems. The first is that I have a tank full of green hair algae that I cannot get rid of. I just purchased a couple of power heads to go along with the Rena Filstar XP1 canister filter and Aqueon HOB filter.

My second problem is that the Nova Extreme 24" T5 light which I had went out over the weekend and now I need to purchase a new light but do not know what light would be good to grow the coral I want to add. Since I would like to get a larger tank in a year or 2 I am not sure if I should stay with a T5 light or upgrade to LED on this system but stay with my budget.

The tank dimensions are 24w x 19h x 12 front to back.

I also just purchased a RO/DI system from Air/Water/Ice to see if the water I was getting from my LFS might be the problem with the algae.

Since I am still fairly new at this hobby I would appreciate any suggestions you could offer.

Thanks.

 

Partsman 19

a 4 lamp T5 fixture over that sized set up would be good for majority of corals IME
You may have to place the more light demanding species if you had them closer to the lights - but soft corals and LPS for example would be fine right down at the sand bed under 4 tubes

if you later upgraded to a 48 inch tank - another T5 unit could be purchased and both units run side by side - but IMHO when you do upgrade you will probably want to look at a light unit for that set up rather than using 2 units side by side


GHA - good quality RODI is a great 1st step

are you running GFO ( phosphate remover)?
because adding that, combined with manual removal of the GHA onb a weekly basis at water change time, is a popular method of dealing with that pest

if you dont have corals - removing the rock into a bucket of tank water and scrubbing with a toothbrush after pulling off as much as you can by hand , rinse in bucket of tank water and then put back in tank
do this and at same time run GFO - as that will then absorb the released phosphates that the decaying algae give off

hope that helps

Steve