Help?

[teamsleep]

My sand and rock and glass are getting a brown color to it. Now I understand this is using tap water that is high in levels of something... dont remember what exactly, but I know it wont harm anything etc... but it is very annoying to have to keep cleaning it so often. I have done a half water change with distilled water and now I only add distilled water, but the problem keeps happening? Anything I can do to help this go away...?

 

[dmjordan]

switch to ro/di water

 

[teamsleep]

I have switched to Distilled water... but I still find the saem problem... I mean I cant do a full water change... I can only do so much so it seems like there will always be traces of the tap water? There are no suppliments or invertabrates or coral that feed off of this substance?

 

[mopar9012]

how long has your tank been running? Distilled water is better but can have i think copper in it so i would recomend using RO water. You can buy RO water from your LFS, sometimes cheaper than distilled.
Hermit crabs will feed off diatoms but wont make it go away.
Is it even diatoms? does it look like dirt that u can brush off?

 

[reefkprz]

if the tank ias relatively new its probably the "ugly phase" your going through. you can try adding copepods and amphipods and the like and they may eat the brown stuff.

 

[cgrant]

i would get a ro/di, alot of your problem is you are using tap water.
my tap water tds was like 250, ro/di is 0