Cleaned Algae, Now What?

[dale serbousek]

I set my tank up about 4 months ago. Have 55# live rock and 3-4 inch live sand. I have only a damsel and a brittle star,,,had them for about 2-1/2 months.
After about 2 months, I started getting a lot of green algae-style plant balls that were definitely not hair algae, but they took over every sqaure inch of my live rock and sand. The creatures stayed alive, but the plant growth was HUGE! They were green with blue tips on alot of the growth. I kept waiting for it to deplete all the nutrients in the water (I change 10% water every 2 weeks), and it never seemed to happen. I tested the tank water and my water source for phosphates and it always read as zero or near zero.
Finally last Monday I manually grabbed the algae out by hand and pulled all the rocks out and brushed algae clean off under luke warm saltwater and put them back in tank. There waas amazingly still coraline under the stuff.
Now, three days later cyno is showing up on sides of glass (was not when green stuff was on rocks) and they green is coming back on rocks!! Phosphates still zero!! What can I do....do I need to wait it out for a few more months before seeing the green stuff subside? Can I add a chemical to fend off the greem monster?

 

[adrian]

Your most likely dealing with excess nutrients, or poor lighting or both. How old are your light bulbs? Do you have a skimmer? Are you performing frequent partial water changes? If so are you using RO water? What are the nitrate concentrations?

 

[dale serbousek]

I have three 55W PC Half/Half--
They are three months old. I have a berlin airlift skimmer that collects a half canister of coffee colored water with NO foul smell every other day. I do 10% water change every month. I NEVER feed the fish...as I do not want to add to nutrient content. I do not use RO water because my tap water is showing zero phosphates. I run lights about 11 hours a day. Hope this helps.

 

[kev]

What do you have by way of a clean up crew? If you don't have any snails or crabs you could get some of those to help out. Even the addition of a Lawnmower Blenny... my tank was going through the same things and after I got my lawnmower, lets just say the algae is gone . Also, I wouldn't add any chemicals to get rid of the algae... not a good idea.