Should I start again?

Hi Everyone,

About 1 month ago I purchased dry rock and cleaned it and added it to my tank. The cycle happened unusually fast within 2 weeks I had ammonia 0 PPM, nitrite 0 PPM and I have been waiting patiently for my nitrates to drop to controllable level before I add a clean up crew.

The Salt Water store around the corner recommended at this time I add live rock, which to me seems to be a mistake being my 3 pieces of live rock are now encased in many varying types of algae.

My nitrates are at the top of the scale around 80 - 160 PPM if I change 10% weekly, algae is building as it has been within this state for 2 weeks now.

I am contemplating taking the whole thing down and re-scrubbing my rocks and starting from scratch again!

On the most part the algae is of a brownish color which my understanding could be diatoms.

I will upload an image shortly! I have a reduced light cycle as I am trying to seed my dry rock but I keep having to shorten the light cycle more and more.

 

Wow! Photo Bucket butchered the quality - might be useless to share these images but hey,

 

Tim, what elst are you running? Like a sump, etc.

How did you start your cycle? raw shrimp in the DT? Did you start it with the rock?
Sounds like your rock was already LR?

Fromn the sounds of it, keep going and with WC's and the LR, your nitrates should fall to undetectable.
I'm sure there are plenty of people who can help.

Saw your photos- if there's no real bad stuff like Aptasia, etc,. I'd keep going and do some WC's also.
Hard to tell, looks like there may be some Green hair algae.

 

Hi,

I have a 75 G Display tank with a 30 G Sump - no cleanup crew, no filter media - just a skimmer.

I did start the cycle with the "dry" rock I followed the rise in ammonia / nitrate etc. It seems pretty standard to me outside the fact my nitrates are a little on the extreme side.

With the Algae build up - could I get away with adding a clean up crew? Or will I just be wasting money adding crabs to my tank with high nitrates?

 

IDK if crabs handle nitrates well, some one will though.

 

No problem!

I am patient I can wait - The correct thing would be to wait until my nitrates are down, I am just trying to avoid the situation where my tank is over-ran by algae.

 

Where did you get the rocks? What did you use for an ammonia source? Did you add a bottled bacterial supplement? Did you use tap water?

Something's amiss, here. Clean dry rock alone would not have cycled the tank...

 

I agree,

I purchased the dry rock from a well known fish store locally in town.

Nothing, which I thought was odd - to me I assumed there was organic material within the dry rock, which is what I am suspecting is keeping the nitrates high.

I did not.

Yes I did! - All 3 of the major Salt Water specialist stores told me they would sell me an RO / DI but they admitted that the city water is decent and by using prime I should not have an issue.

I have purchased a RO DI unit from Spectrapure - it is in transit still.

 

I thought you said you rinsed your rock in ammonia?

 

LOL Nope, I scrubbed it but I did not rinse anything in ammonia!