Dino's, Yikes!!

[coolhandgoose]

So I think I have dino's. At first I thought it was diatoms since I had put a new powerhead in and it stirred up a lot of sand. But the brown dusty stuff eventually turned into stringy stuff with bubbles on it. It also got worse as the day went on with the lights on, thus confirming my suspicion of dino's.

I've been away from home the last few days so I haven't been able to deal with it properly so I changed the lighting cycle to only 3 hours in an effort to contain it a little.

Any advice on how to battle this succesfully would be greatly appreciated.

I'll get some water params when I get home, from what I've read, ph and phosphate seem to be the key parameters in fighting dino's.

 

[Northstar24]

ph and phosphate are a good place to start, but most phosphate tests will read 0 becasue its all being consumed by the dinos

How old is your tank? How old are your bulbs? I spent two months fighting dinos and I crossed everything off on the list except my bulbs. Once the lights were changed, the dinos went away overnight

 

[coolhandgoose]

I just recently changed half my lights a month ago, the other half are a year old. I'm thinking I definitely need to change the other bulbs as well. The tank is about a year old.

 

[Fireplug]

I had the same thing a week ago. Now this is just my experience......but my lamps were just 6 months old (t5's)...went with less time with lights on and it seemed to diminish. But when I ran the lights longer it would grow.....So I did a WC and upgraded to Metal Halides and it seem to burn it...lol. i raked up as much as possible and now the hermits are eating the little pieces. So my experience was prob long photo time and maybe bulbs needed to be replaced.

 

[coolhandgoose]

Yeah, I tend to run a pretty long photo period of about 11 hours. I'm thinking I'll definitely change the other 3 bulbs with new ones, My wife told me my finger leather is covered in it right now, so i'll get her to blast it off with the turkey baster.

 

[Bifferwine]

I would do a blackout for several days to try and get them under control.

 

[coolhandgoose]

So I did 5 days of only havng my lights on for 3 hours and it seems to have cleared up to the point where it's 95% gone. I've gone back to a full lighting cycle of about 8 hours now to see what happens. I did a water change this morning and had to bump up the dkh which was at 4. So now it's at 8. My ph was about 8.3 in the morning ad about 8.4 in the afternoon.