I think its a good point that TDS can consist of anything...one person's TDS of 20 if it is all phosphate is a bigger deal than someone else who has a 40 TDS and it is all calcium. But in the interest of safe advice, we have to assume the worst case.
TDS is just a number...and we can say 0 TDS will always be good whereas higher levels are going to be hit or miss.
@binford...you are on DWSD (detroit) water. The Trop is also on DWSD water...so it is no surprise to me that you can get by with 40 TDS. The Trop for example uses straight tap.
This is what I'm dealing with. I'm seeing it only on the tank back (in pix) all the glass and on the powerheads. I don't know whether it's Dino's or Diatoms. I just scraped the back yesterday~I took this pix today. So it came back overnight.
What you are seeing is normal in unmature systems and the reason why I paint my backgrounds black rather than blue. I don't clean the back and with black you don't see it, with blue like my sons tanks have it looks nasty.
A reef will continue to evolve and go through algae stages for up to a year or more. I remember when I first set up my present system 7.5 years ago, it went through every stage you can imagine before settling down. I have never used anything but RO/DI from a well maintained Spectrapure MaxCap so I know none of it was water quality related yet I still had it all and in every color of the rainbow. I went through hair algae, diatom blooms, dinos, bubble algae, cotton candy algae, red slime, green slime, black slime, you name it I had it at one time or another and chalk it up to the maturation process.
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