My Water Stinks and I Have Algae

Hi everyone,

I have a 250 gallon reef tank that I have had for about 2 years now and within the last 3 months I have been having huge water problems. My water absolutely stinks! At first I thought it was because of my mermaid tails so I ditched those but the water still smells and I can't do a big enough water change to make a real difference. I have a setup big enough to make 50 gallons at a time but I'm thinking I might need about 100 gallons. I have been puzzled for awhile too because my water parameters are perfect, I didn't believe my old test kits and thought I had wrong results so I went and bought all new Red Sea test kits and those are still showing zero nitrates and nitrites, PH at 8.2 and my calcium is at 445ppm, phosphates are at zero too. So I am at a complete loss.

I do have a deep sand bed about 4.5" deep that I think might be causing my problem, could it be that the sand is dying for some reason? I was thinking about buying a boat load of nutri-seawater about fifty gallons of it and adding that to my water change? I'm getting pretty desperate to get this resolved because now I am having a ton of hair algae take over everything.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!!

Happy Easter to all!

Don

 

I am not entirely sure what could be causing the problem but it sounds like the gha is masking some of your results in your tests. If you have gha than you have some nutrients that aren't showing up in your tests. I'm sure someone else will chime in with something better.
Happy Easter to you. Wish you luck.

 

Oops left out one of the more important details, the algae I have is like hair algae but it is red in color almost like cyano.

 

I'd run a large amount of carbon.

 

+1 on the carbon, should take care of smells, you didn't mention you were using any, if so, maybe change it, and back off if any corals bleach.

IME and HO, I'd slowly get rid of the DSB also

 

Nothing is dead hiding somewhere?

 

Yeah, the stuff in his DSB! LOL I don't know for sure- just saying

 

do you use a protein skimmer? i agree a good carbon should help with smell another thing to check would be flow,live rock can die off without enough flow.

 

Thanks for the ideas. I have a BRS GFO and Carbon reactor and I have switched the GFO reactor over to carbon just for a short time to see if I can get rid of the smelly water. All my fish are alive and accounted for lol that was the first thing I thought of when this whole mess started is who kicked the bucket that I didn't know about. I did cut way back on feeding them because I thought that was the issue but then they got really skinny and I saw no improvements after a month of that. I have a Precision Marine Bullet 3 with a Pan World 40PX that skims my water and that is new because I thought maybe my old skimmer wasn't doing a good enough job but that hasn't helped either, just made my electricity bill sky rocket.

How do I go about removing the DSB? And what would be a good thickness of sand to have? For water flow I have two Hydor 850gph pumps and my return pump is an external Iwaki MD-55 RLT.

Thanks again for the suggestions!