water tests

ok my tank is 2 monthes old. my nitites and nitrares went off the chart. after regular water changes and still battleing brown algae which is now turning green and hard to scrape off which i think is a good thing my ammonia is 0.50 my nitite is 0.50 my nitrate is 20 is this mean my tank is cycleing right and close to the end?

 

By what your Nitrite nitrate and ammonia readings are I would say that your tank is cycling normally, As for your Algae it sounds like you may have a high phosphate level in your water! possibly from using tap water instead of RO/DI water.............  John

Check out the Algae link http://www.3reef.com/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.pl?board=Algae

 

yes i use tap water its actually well water i have a water sofener but have no salt in it, just lazy i guess, my well is a little high in iron. the animals i have 2 peperment shrimp, 1 yellow tail damsel 1 condy, cause there cheep, 1 lta i got cheep, i brown clown are all doing perfect. whats a good way to lower phosphates i dont have a test for that yet. will get one.

 

OK For your Phosphates you can get a phosphate sponge from your LFS and put it in your filter tray in your wet/day.

Now for your livestock ! you really should wait until your cycle has ended to add your livestock and then only 1 fish every 3 to 4 weeks to give your biological filter time to adjust to the new bio load from adding your livestock

 

I'd say that you may well have added livestock a little too rapidly and so your feeding them has indeed contributed to an excess of phosphates.  I wouldn't resort to the RO water just yet....deal with a possible phosphate problem first. There are many good quality products out there for that...Phosban and Purigen are very well spoken of in the forums so I'd try one of those, but there are others that are good too. Cut down on feeding a bit, do water changes and cut an hour or two off of both ends of the tank's photo-period and I bet that the algae start to die back. AND, get a good skimmer if you don't have one...They are really useful for that.