saltyfins
Well-Known Member
Thank you for this! I am going to do this, I am fighting LCA and I have a Pentair 40 watt, that's just been sitting since I got the system, 2 years ago! lazy I guess...but it's going into the system! I dont like the idea of dosing waterglass...considering what that is... however...I have to do something. thanks for giving me hope!This is what I had and I beat it in 3 days.
It was getting all over everything and getting my corals pretty upset. It started in the sand and you cannot get rid of it. I let my diamond goby handle that, then it moved to the rocks and really got me mad.
I have about 90-100 gallons of water volume. My display is 3'x2'x12" tall 45 gallons. I have a decent sized refugium tank in back and a little below the display and a 36" sump too under the tank...just for mind-visual sake.
This stuff would look like it was almost gone every morning and then by lights out, it would be all over the place making bubble threads on my acros, covering my rock and sending me into borderline rage. No matter how many times I blasted it off the corals and rocks, it was back in a few minutes. So I sat and thought about it, read a million threads on it became discouraged, drank vodka and decided to just take up basketweaving instead.
I bought an icecap 27watt UV and plumbed it off my return manifold and feeding the refugium for simplicity sake. Don't worry about what type you got. You're gonna MAKE IT water-borne!
So I started letting it accumulate throughout the day, that's right...let it build up over the day! Don't turn the lights off...give them what they want and let them proliferate... And I waited until about a minute or two before lights out, and then I struck. lol
Hit that stuff with a big old turkey baster real hard. go through the rock work several times and make it fly! Theres going to be a lot of stuff flying around in the water and it will look pretty bad. Don't worry...keep blasting! Make sure to turn your pumps up and yes if you have SPS corals they slime like crazy from it which is good because they're cleaning themselves. Don't worry about them they're fine. Anyway, you want that overflow to be pulling hard so turn those return pumps up! Once the lights go out and the suspended crap has mostly gone down the overflow for a while, give a dose of peroxide in the typical 1 ml-per10 gallon thingy. Now wait about 2 hours...you're going to have a lot of that dino crap in your filter bags if you have them and if you use "reef teepee" dispensers, you MAY go through a roll...I dunno. lol
Whether it's the waterborne type or not, you have to blast it good man! Get it in the water and out of the tank to the overflow...TO THE UV which in my case was set to a slow flow rate of about 100-110gph which i guess is kind of kill mode. I think this is pretty important.
After the 2 hours have gone by since the peroxide dose, take the filter socks out and scrub them good. Make them white again and put them back.
Not sure if it matters, but I always feed live phytoplankton at night before I go to bed, and I continued with that.
It may be a variable or not. I'm treating it as not deviating from my norm.
Go to bed dummy, it's 3 in the morning!
Observe the following morning. The first morning after for me was questionable, but as the day drew to a close, I noticed there were slightly less total accumulations...the second day was even less. I saw a few bubbles here and there. Yesterday, I didn't notice anything and today it can be said they're gone. I mean, nothing blows off the rocks at all. I'm blown away how clean the tank is. Now bear in mind, I did the SAME THING each night. I didn't start drinking beer and rocking out when I noticed less. It's not party time yet. I repeated the process each night.
Don't mess with your sand!!!! Worst thing you can do! Get a diamond goby if you don't have one now. He will do it for you properly without disturbing the bacteria and weakening the allies...you are not eliminating the dinos entirely by doing what I did it would be harder to do that...What you're doing is forcing their "army" down to a size that another army in your tank can now handle so to speak. You'll be killing a lot of it yourself, but ultimately the tank will take care of the rest.
Try it...but follow the directions...if you have a UV, peroxide and a turkey baster, it's free right?
If you dont have a UV, quit putzin around and get one. Any one with a halfway decent reef with corals and fish they care about should have one. I'm a believer.
I did not add any chemicals, I do not have carbon or gfo in my house at all, and my photoperiod has been tweaked (intensified) for BETTER coral growth, but never turned off. They say no white lights...well whatever! No blackout period. No water changes, no dosing changes, no nothing typically asked during chemical treatment.
No black bag over my tank.
I'm not some expert elite reefer stud with a Marine Biology Degree here. I just know that if you kill a little more of something each day faster than it can recuperate, it will eventually DIE DIE DIE. And that is good good good! I don't know if one type of dino is more or less vulnerable to UV, but in my case the UV killed them, or they would have come right back like I repeated for a week before this like a helpless fanatic.
I am leaving the UV on duty for good because it seems like a good idea and I am also waiting on some Keys Live Mud for my fuge and Sand for my display from Florida Pets to increase the microdiversity in my tank. I think the reason this happened in my case is being an idiot who knows better and using fake rock instead of live rock, but that is only speculation. MOST of the tanks I see with this are fake rock tanks and that's usually where this stuff is the worst since there is no opposition to it.
Again, just try it and let me know how it works for you.
P.S. This shot has me PTSD-ing hard man...hehe. It's the "should I take all my sand out and start over?" look.
No, don't do that...my sand is like new today. immaculate.
