If it's not one thing it's another
by
, 09-18-2013 at 02:51 PM (4236 Views)
Well it has been quite a while since I have posted anything so I will give a quick rundown of how things have been going.
First off sadly I have been a little busy caught in life to really take great care of my tank (second child born, in-laws in town, oldest back to school, etc.) so it has been running on autopilot for a while. I am fighting a fairly large hair algae problem currently and I think it stems from me not adding any live rock when I did the tank restart at the beginning of the year. I am considering adding a little live rock to help seed the dry marco rock that I added to begin with. I also have added some filters to help me try and collect small particulates that I am hoping will help out. I also have a Hanna Phosphate checker on the way so I can accurately read my source water, RO-DI water, and also make sure I am getting no phosphates added from my salt.
I had a bit of a tragedy with the tank recently that is also contributing to my algae woes. I added some more biopellets to my reactor and noticed a small drip on the inlet side of the reactor. I tightened up the clamp on it and the leak stopped and I went to work. I can home from work that night, went to bed, and awoke the next morning to find the drip had become a light spray and it had drained my sump to empty in the return. Well it ended up shattering my heater, luckily it didn't seem to do too much damage there, but it also caused my return pump to run dry, all of my top off water to dump into my tank, and a breaker in my house to pop right as I walked into the fishroom.
I have since replaced the heater, not trusting the old power strip that was hooked up at the same time I have also changed it out. I had to make emergency tank water so needless to say it was just dechlorinated faucet water. Yes it has been interesting. I don't seem to have had any actual loss but I have contacted Coral Vue for a replacement for my barbed elbow that actually cracked in 6 places! Once my replacement part arrives I get to start up the whole bio pellet process from scratch again while in the meantime fighting what will undoubtedly become a worse algae problem before it gets better.
I have not had any noticeable loss from this catastrophe yet but my montipora cap has lightened it's color and is no longer a deep orange as it was before all this happened.
On the bright side my son's 10 gallon freshwater tank finally finished it's cycle and we added fish to it this week! ha ha
Once I get my tester in later this week I will have a better idea of how to potentially tackle this algae problem until then I am not even going to speculate.