Water looks horrible!

Its from the Wheel of Time series. A character from book 2. ive been contemplating a diatom filer for months as well. just hook up some vinyl tubing to a maxing jet that will push through a fitler, that way I can collect detrius without wasting a bunch of tank water (this is for my 46gal that ive never done a water change on. Also andthing I through in there does great.)

 

there might be something to that!

 

yeah its pretty bad, im bummed

 

If i got something terribad in the 46 i wouldnt be worried, since my pointed neglect can only anger the gods. But i throw dead corals in there all the time and they flourish, the water have been clear for 6 years, and aside from mderate amounts of nuisence aglae i cant be more happy with it.

In my 55, could the phyto bloom hurt or help my corals in there? My hydnophora just stops stn'ing and my acro looks great, I've read that only pods, clams and a couple of softies use phyto for food, but its vutting down on my par for sure which worries me a little for my acro since I'm pretty boarderline on light as it is. And other pros cons? Inwall, think I should swap out my GFO material, its only been running for a month.

 

The use of phyto by clams may be less than thought since researchers have for zooxanthellae channels to the guts of clams that are thumbnail size and smaller.

Changing the GFO might be a good idea, using it for more than a month can diminish it's effectiveness greatly.

 

I consider UV's to be a useful type of filtration. A lot of people set them up wrong, don't clean the quartz often enough, don't replace the bulbs in a timely fashion, or run water through them too fast. In those cases it is a complete waste of money.

With that said, if I'm on a limited budget and I can afford a good protein skimmer and a UV, or I could skip the UV and get an amazing protein skimmer.....I'm going to get the amazing protein skimmer.

 

It won't hurt your corals other than limiting their access to light. You are correct, most corals don't DIRECTLY ingest phyto. It can feed other things that your corals can ingest such as bacterioplankton and zooplankton/marine snow.

Somehow your water column had more phosphorus in it than normal and allowed a bloom. Did you go out of town and have someone else feed the tank for a while (I.e. OVERfeed). Did your protein skimmer stop working for a while? Possibly your sandbed got disturbed? It certainly won't hurt to put new GFO in there.

 

yep thats it. I pulled the two sponges out of my skimmer a couple days ago and stuff (looked like coral food lol) got dumped in before i could shut off the skimmer and syphon it out. GG lol. Picked up the only uv in town now I have to wire it.... yeah i have to wire it to a converter. is tootaly ghetto but i think it will do the job. Thanks everyone for your help ill update in a few days.

 

Put in a new bag of carbon too.

 

ok literally the only UV sterilizer in town was a POS. I cant take it apart to get to the bulb, and in order to make it go, I need to buy 3 pieces of electrical equipment. The guy at radio shack even shrugged and said, IDK. Inwall what are you using? I got to order one.