Getting rid of brown/diatom algae

ltkenbo

ltkenbo

Reefing newb
Started getting some brown/diatom algae in my tank which got worse over the last couple of days. have performed 3 5 gallon water changes (about 25%) yesterday and today, and along with doing that vacuumed out a lot of it. Flow is good, lighting is fine. So other than decreasing lighting period and water changes, how can I actually remove the algae that is currently in there? You can't pull it out it just falls in to pieces and when I try to blow the rocks off to get it to get sucked up by the overflow is just settles somewhere else and gets caught on rocks and corals.
 
Sounds like you are going though a normal, early tank algae bloom. What sort of clean up crew do you have on board? What type of water are you using? What are your water parameters. Some additional informaiton can help us diagnose the problem.
 
Well my tank is 6 months old and I already went through 2 green algae blooms. In the past it seemed that green algae always followed the diatom algae. Got plenty of turbo snails, nass snails, hermit crabs, and nass snails, there's no way a clean up crew could keep up with diatoms especially since they are everywhere. Nitrates are low especially after the 3 water changes, ammonia 0, nitrites 0, pH 8.4, I have a sump but I tried putting chaeto in it once and it didn't work because I don't have a fuge area so it just got ripped apart.
 
Really nothing you can do about diatoms in a young tank. Make sure you have enough nassarius snails, they'll keep the sand pretty clean. As your tank matures, you will see diatoms less and less frequently.
 
ltkenbo said:
Well my tank is 6 months old and I already went through 2 green algae blooms. In the past it seemed that green algae always followed the diatom algae. Got plenty of turbo snails, nass snails, hermit crabs, and nass snails, there's no way a clean up crew could keep up with diatoms especially since they are everywhere. Nitrates are low especially after the 3 water changes, ammonia 0, nitrites 0, pH 8.4, I have a sump but I tried putting chaeto in it once and it didn't work because I don't have a fuge area so it just got ripped apart.
Click to expand...


Put the cheato in a clear small plastic container like from the deli and poke a zillion holes in it. And yes, it must be a zillion or it might not work.
 
Ahh!! When will it go away? I just did another water change last night and I'm doing one tonight to help clean out the sump more. Everytime I blow it off the rocks and it gets sucked up it just comes back later. I heard possibly that this could be caused by lighting change. I just upgraded to a nova 6 bulb T5 fixture, it's like 200 more watts than I had. Is this the cause and will this ever go away?
 
It will go away when everything balances out in your tank, 2 days - 6 months. There isn't really an answer to that question.

Lighting can cause some algaes to grow, but only if you have the nutrients in the tank that feeds it. All new tanks have these nutrients.

Be careful about over doing your water changes this can cause your tank to start a cycle over.

Patients patients patients... it will go away.
 
So I got a couple new test kits including a phosphate test kit and nitrates, ammonia, phosphates, and nitrites are all at 0. However, I do not have a silicate test kit which I known is a main feeder of diatoms. The article here: https://www.livingreefs.com/diatoms-t394.html
says that silicate will not be filtered out after a while by your RO/DI unit, is this true? If so, I guess this could be causing my problem, cause everything else is fine in the water. Can you recommend any good silicate test kits as well as a media or "sponge" to allow me to remove these?
 
I've never tested for silicates. Diatoms may be ugly, but they are harmless. Silicates are mostly found in the substrate, not in the water. So once they use up the silicates in the sand, the diatom outbreaks become less frequent. If you were going to buy a test, I'd go with Salifert. They are pricey but are the best.
 
But I can see that as the only things causing the problem, yeah they are most harmless except to the soft corals, they stick all over them and prevent them from opening up. What are some methods of absorbing these out of the water column. Even if they are coming from the sand it still should be possible to absorb them out of the water as to impede the growth of the diatoms right?
 
Yeah you're talking about like chaeto? That won't work in my sump the way I have it now. Anyways, the problem is not nitrates and phosphates, it has to be silicates. I need suggestion on how to lower those.
 
The algae that would grow on the scrubber will eat up all the silicates. I switched my whole set up to an algae scrubber with no skimmer for about a month and all my algae seems to be dying off and all i need to do is clean the scrubber for 5 minutes a week
 
Chemi-pure Elite is good and thats been doing real well in my tank as far as you said you had some green hair algea, Im thinking thats what you said, An algea scrubber would help with that, Im working on building one and there has been many people on hear that have built them and they all seem to be happy loooseing the nasty green stuff. It seems the brown stuff comes and goes. just remember your tank isnt like your lfs tank, I learned that the hard way
 

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