Loosing my patience with the uglies

[EeyoreIsMySpiritAnimal]

I was planning to do a 40 gallon water change. In your opinion, should I do it and add some good stuff (bacteria)? With the water change? will be adding more hermits ttomorrow, andthis weekend i be getting more snails. Coming to town. Yes

What is the purpose of the water change? Your nitrates are already very low, and phosphate is not often reduced significantly with a WC.
*If you feel you need to do a water change for the health of your livestock, by all means do, I'm just not sure it will help the algae with your nutrients already so low... Just some thoughts.

 

[Lavey29]

I was planning to do a 40 gallon water change. In your opinion, should I do it and add some good stuff (bacteria)? With the water change? will be adding more hermits ttomorrow, andthis weekend i be getting more snails. Coming to town. Yes

Your picture is hard to see but appears to be more GHA. Weekly water changes are critical the first year. You need a diverse cleaner crew. With a large tank like yours, you need more big eaters like trochus, turbos and 3 or 4 tuxedo urchins. Algae grazing tang type fish too. I would cut lights to 6 hours with blue and UV only, no whites. Do this for 3 weeks. Daily manual removal. Add copepods and daily dose of phytoplankton. You need to rebuild your biodiversity and microfauna. I went through a GHA jungle phase also around 6 months but stayed on course with keeping the tank parameters stable and it went away in about 3 months. You need to get phosphate down as others mentioned so no coral additives. These tend to raise phosphate. As others mentioned also, if you have room even in the sump a couple real live wet ocean rocks will Jumpstart things for you again.viewed. patience is essential in this hobby too. The first year can be rough at times.

 

[livinlifeinBKK]

If you do decide to try bacterial additives, add PNS bacteria like PNS Probio and bacteria like that. It likely still won't achieve the same results as live ocean rock but it's a lot better than the bacterial additives commonly used which makes claims to magically solve any problem regardless of cause. Those products tend to contain bacteria which are already present in your tank (or certainly should already be present). If there's an issue with them building a healthy population, adding more of the same won't solve the problem in the long run.