Sand bed HELP......

[gabbie]

Well we have a 55 gallon with 1 cardinal, 1 little percula, 1 scopias tang, 2 cleaner shrimp, 2 emeralds, 3 snails, and some button polyps.
Our tank has been up and running for 6 months now we changed to Sand bed about four months ago.
We run 1 fluval wich we do plan to disgard, 1 over the head filter, and seaclone skimmer, and about 10 lbs live rock.
Our problem is we noticed green algae spreading on the sand bed. We went to LFS store. He suggested poly ox. We have bben using it at half does for a week now we have a ton of brown stuff that spreads like fire and then turns green. Whats up with this how do we get rid of this. The lfs store said it would be okay to ge the stuff out after turing green. It goes brown then green and gets bubbles please someone help me get rid of this... Any suggestions to help... Should I get more of a clean up crew???

 

[striker]

What would help us determine your problem a little better would be your water conditions. I've always felt that you have to tackle the problem from the source and going to a lfs for advice is many times the wrong thing to do. They like to offer quick and easy solutions for problems that they can sell over the counter to make profit from. One thing that strikes me is that you only have 10lbs of lr. You mention a sand bed but how deep is it? What are your feeding habits? Also before you disgard your fluval you should make sure you have enough bioliogical filtration in order to offset it's removal. When I removed my ehiem(with bio-balls) I had experienced a fluctuation in water conditions and a mini spike. You can continue to run your fluval for additional water movement and water containment. In order to help with the excess nutrients in your water you could add some live plants and extra lr into your tank or even add a refugium with caulerpa(spreads like wildfire, don't add into main tank).