How to best battle nutrients in a nano AIO tank?

[pygo1]

Hi Pygo 1, After looking at the tank again. Overall your tank looks good. It's really just the confined shallow water area where the algae sprouts heavily. I wouldn't use any more chemical. Can you rev up protein skimming some? How about 30 turbos, buy some small tangs, yellow, sailfin, small algae eating wrasse, go light on feedings and I think your algae will be gone. I''ll miss your lil. sexy miss. mermaid (though a bit spooky). I don't know, I think I would keep her! Cheeeeeeeeeers! Kurt

lol hate to break it to you bud, but those are beefy man hands. Pic didnt do them justice I guess lol.

It's only a 30 gal so tangs arent really an option, as much as I'd like one. My feedings are pretty light already, I just lowered my photoperiod, but the skimmer could probably use some adjustment.

 

[Orito]

If it's just GHA maybe your maintenance schedule is to far apart

 

[pygo1]

I have 3 turbos, 2 trochus and 3 astrea snails in my 16g! Plus 5 hermits and an emerald crab...those guys pretty much keep any algae in check. I will see an occasional tuft growing from a crack they can't get to, and I will handle those myself, but otherwise they do a pretty good job keeping it at bay.

You should probably significantly up your cuc after you manually pull all that stuff. For a 30g only 2 turbos seems not even close to manage...especially if you have that much algae growing.

Yeah I've been slowly beefing up the CUC again. I had a ton of stuff that slowly died out, so I'm adding a few things at a time to prevent starvation. LFS inverts are getting more expensive now too! There are some turban snails in a local harbor that mow this stuff down like mad, but the water is cold right now so I haven't been out to collect them recently haha

Lately, I've been doing manual removal weekly at minimum. Guess it's time to go snail hunting again

 

[pygo1]

If it's just GHA maybe your maintenance schedule is to far apart

I just worked an 80 hour week, so its a little out of whack right now due to being tired, but generally I go in for manual removal every few days(weekly at minimum). This stuff just grows like the dang plague and WCs aren't enough to keep up with it.

I'm looking into either A)building an auto water change system, so I can more or less set it and forget it. or B) revisit a chaeto reactor setup. I just need to find a proper vessel to make one. No way in hell I'm paying $200 for a reactor, I'm a cheapskate lol

My setup is a little bit of a tight squeeze in my office. Tank is on a reinforced dresser, not a proper stand, so I don't have cabinet space underneath to add equipment, I'm thinking of securing a tube to the side of the stand to work as a fuge/reactor, still in the planning stage for that though

 

[Tamberav]

currently i'm a little more lax on the WCs, but for a good while i was doing them religiously every few days and that did nothing to knock it back either. I'm considering setting up an AWC system just to stay on top of it, but that's more for my alk, I dont see it being the solution to this outbreak

Auto water change doesn’t address trapped debris which is probably the issue. You don’t really do a water change to exchange just water, it is to remove debris.

Take a turkey baster and blast the crevices of the rock and stir the sand and water change after then change the floss/sock once tank clears.

Also I have had many high nutrient tanks and no gha to be found. Likely because the rock was old ocean rock and covered In coralline and sponges and such.

Blennies are meh.. a female emerald can do some heavy duty work depending how you feel about crabs.

Also don’t fall into the tang trap. They are poop machines, aggressive, and don’t always eat algae well. It’s not like every nano needs a tang or it will have algae.

 

[pygo1]

Auto water change doesn’t address trapped debris which is probably the issue. You don’t really do a water change to exchange just water, it is to remove debris.

Take a turkey baster and blast the crevices of the rock and stir the sand and water change after then change the floss/sock once tank clears.

Also I have had many high nutrient tanks and no gha to be found. Likely because the rock was old ocean rock and covered In coralline and sponges and such.

Blennies are meh.. a female emerald can do some heavy duty work depending how you feel about crabs.

Also don’t fall into the tang trap. They are poop machines, aggressive, and don’t always eat algae well. It’s not like every nano needs a tang or it will have algae.

ah yeah I forgot to mention that. I do blast the rocks with a baster every few days a little while before changing the filter socks. My first round with GHA was probably due to this, i didnt clean the rocks pretty much ever. Nowadays, there isn't a whole lot that comes off the rocks anymore.

I don't mess with the sandbed much though. I have an army of nassarius snails that churn it pretty well. There's cyano deep in the sand bed and I'd like to keep it there lol.

& to your high nutrients, no GHA tanks... That's kind of the goal here. Nutrients aren't everything, it's more about finding a competitive balance between different organisms, but I just can't seem to tip the scales. I don't have much coralline, so that's one contributing factor. On the other end, the inhabitants that are supposed to eat it just don't(or cant keep up).

Blennies are definitely meh in terms of performance. I knew it wouldn't be much of a solution, but I like their personalities, algae eating would've just been a bonus.

I currently have an arrow crab in the tank, so I'm not sure how emeralds would fare, but I might give that a shot(had one a year or so ago, didn't have a huge impact at the time)