High Tide Aquatics

Max’s 30 gal

Cyano or diatoms? How can I tell the difference? I’m leaning towards diatoms because this is new rock in a new tank, but I have very high flow so I think diatoms wouldn’t stick? I can test phosphorous with my Hanna to see if I have some excess nutrients but I never had algae in my other tanks so I’m unsure. For now I just blow it off with a baster so it doesn’t mess with my corals.

Also, is all the dusty stuff that piles up just clownfish shit? I keep sucking out something dusty and I’m not sure if it’s fish poop or just the new rock eroding in the flow?
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hard to tell from that pic. Looks like some bubbles.. i dont think diatoms cause bubbles... could be dino... Turn on some whites and get a better pic :D
 
hard to tell from that pic. Looks like some bubbles.. i dont think diatoms cause bubbles... could be dino... Turn on some whites and get a better pic :D
I keep forgetting I can use Mobius now to do that, so cool!
Here are some pics of the stringy brown stuff. Cyano or diatoms? What could I test to get a better idea? I have the Hanna ULR phosphate checker and the api master kit.
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and here’s whites vs blues for the full tank, so much green algae right now, can’t wait for the coralline to take over
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I would say Dino for the stringy stuff. 3 day black out seems to work well for the most part. Often caused by super low nitrates or phosphate.
 
I would say Dino for the stringy stuff. 3 day black out seems to work well for the most part. Often caused by super low nitrates or phosphate.
Bare bottom is letting me see all the waste that collects so I think I’ve been lacking nutrients, I’m gonna test later to confirm that suspicion then I might look into nitrate dosing since I have an unused dosing head
 
Phosphate test got .07ppm so I am going to just try the nitrate test from API in case nitrates are too low. I believe this is an okay value for phosphates as it’s between .05-.1ppm, I am going to test again to ensure that reading was correct. I’m not great with the powder reagent for this test
 
I’m using the par meter to figure out a good mounting height for the lights. I currently have them 8” over the water running at 30% on one of the preset spectrums from Ecotech. I get peak of 400-450 par at the surface under the light and about 80-100 at the front of the tank in the low flow area. I’m pretty happy with these results.

I think I might raise the lights up more in order to allow me to increase the intensity on the light and hopefully have a better more even distribution instead of having hot spots. It is a little weird for me to have such a powerful light at only 1/3 it’s capacity, but I’m not gonna bleach my corals just to feel better about the light intensity. WWC mounts close to 16” in order to have more even spread of par but my tank is probably too narrow to go that high without the light primarily illuminating my floor. I do like that at the higher mounting height I can angle my blue led bars to prevent shadowing.

I might have to deal with light spill by making some type of cover around the hanging lights to limit the spill at the source of the light, it’s a bit bright when sitting on my couch. I should be able to easily attach something to the existing aluminum mounting
 
I ordered sodium nitrate and will mix that up to dose, it will be similar to neonitro from bright well according to Telegraham on YouTube. According to this calculator I will get .29ppm/mL from this solution with my tank volume so I won’t need to dose very much, I might start with 4mL and see how that impacts the dinos.

 
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