Le sigh

I look at others beautiful tanks and wonder where am I going wrong? I just watched a video of someones tank and it was 7 months old it was beautiful, plenty of corals, lots of Coraline algae growth very little hair algae or even cyano.

So i turn and look at my tank and see hair algae all over the place, very little Coraline algae, and cyano. I think my tank is about 3 months old. Yes i know i'm new to the marine scene, I don't have RO/DI, i cant run a fuge, i went with a canister filter, and several other likely poor choices. But how do you pro's do it? Don't just say time and knowledge i know that much I'm reading every day on new ways to do things.

I know I should be using Ro/Di water, I took the bio-balls out of the canister filter and I'm looking in to that Seachem's Matrix media but finding a 1 L container of it is proving problematic. I have a Phos-Zorb bag in the filter which should help with the phosphates that are in the tap water, I've reduced the amount of light time hoping it will detour the bad stuff. I picked up some Ulva for some strange reason instead of chaeto. But what else can I do? I have two koralia 750's bashing the water around in my tank and just finally got them pointed so they aren't whipping my poor frogspawn, or jasmine polyps around. But now cyano is just growing on the sand and the day after I pull it out there's a fresh mat of it the next day in the same spot. I'm almost tempted to pickup some of that BlueVet Red Slime control. Though I know it's simply a quick fix it wont fix the problem, but I'm staring in to the abyss. I run a protean skimmer i normally runs dry skimate because if i run it close to wet it just fills the cup with slightly tea stained water.

I know I'm just like all of the other new comers jumping in and then hitting a cliff and not looking for the bridge that's ten feet to the right but I'd still like input.

I don't have time to test my tank parameters right now as I'm about to head off to work but I'm sure I'll post or look on my iPod touch later tonight.

Thanks for reading.

 

lol join the club, mine has about the same problems but I like the way it makes me feel to know that everything is healthy... looks like crap most of the time but everyone is happy and healthy.

 

Fish seem happy the smallest clown loves to rub and perch on the cyano which is concerning but others said clowns are like that. I don't mind the hair algae so much because it gives a natural wavey look to the tank but the lack of pinkey purple coraline algae is almost depressing LOL.

As of today I turned the protean skimmer off along with pulled the bioballs I'm hoping after a few weeks I might see some change? I'll turn the skimmer back on tomatrow I justhad to take the pump down tonight to clean it.

 

you could do an algae turf scrubber there cheep and IMO really would help with the hair algae.

as far ad the coriline algae goes, after almost 3 years mine has started to grow like its suposed to and cover everything but I really with I could make it grow where I wanted it to vs where it feels like ;D

 

I'm a total newbie too. We just hit the 4 month mark and we have coralline growth that just started 4 weeks ago. We jump started the coralline growth by taking an empty shell that had coralline on it and grating it in the water with the pumps turned off for about 10 minutes. About 2 weeks later we saw pink spots starting to form on the back as well as on the pump. Now the pump is about 40% covered and there is quite a bit of coralline growing on the back wall, as well as under the sand line. Just a thought!

 

Yeah I've read about the scratch method

 

Decided to look up that turf scrubber and it's quite interesting but alas I don't have a fuge or an overflow so as it is very cool it wouldn't yet be practical untill I can move out and build a tank of my dreams LOL