Start Over or Not

Good ideas and advice, people. Good luck with your tank, Kovu.

 

It took time for it to get in the shape it is and will take time to recover. Just be very aggressive in keeping it clean.

 

Sounds like a good challenge, but I think I have the drive to over come this and hopefully everything will be great.
Another question is what about my corals being covered what should I do about them?

 

I would add run a sump with a fuge, or even toss some chaeto in your display (this can get messy though if you start scattering little broken peices all over) That would help with the nitrate/phosphate issues. The only thing you cant reover from in a reef i think would be copper (though some people have torn down from algae) YOur issues wont be any different after your re-do

 

If it is hair algae then hermit crabs will help get it off the corals. Remove as mush as you can manually using a toothbrush on the rock and tweezers to remove it from the coral. It will improve as your water quality improves. Change your carbon every two weeks, it can become a nitrate factory if left too long, and your GFO every month. Clean your equipment every month or when you change your carbon.also to get any detritus out. If you are using filter floss change it weekly.

 

The algae growing on the corals is that brown algae, also what is a GFO.

 

GFO is granulated ferric oxide a phosphate remover. The brown algae could be dinoflagelates. You definitely will need GFO ofr some other phosphate remover and will want to go lights out completely for a week to wipe them out. You don't even want light to enter from outside of the tank.

 

It looks like the algae is diatoms and dynos what should I do about them.

 

diatoms are from silicates. silicates come from new plastic and bad water

 

If you are or have been running a phosban reactor and you still have a heavy algae problem, then I would recommend you stick with your gut and get all of that live rock out of your tank and cook it first. There is a good chance that you have phosphates locked inside of the live rock and if thats the case, no amount of GFO or macroalgae is stop that algae problem.

Nuke it, put it back, then run GFO in your system