Ha, Reef Paradise. Good catch Jim-bo!
It was our first time there, and wow what a great store! I like the size of it, just a few insanely stocked and well maintained tanks so you're not over whelmed trying to look through rows and rows of livestock, but it had one of the best coral selections I've seen. Also super friendly and knowledgeable staff.
SPRING CLEANING!!! My tank has been experiencing a little algae bloom, luckily I haven't had to deal with it too much before so I'm not the best at IDing nuisance algae; I wasn't' sure if it's Dinoflagellates, Diatoms, or something else. Either way I was motived to take action now before it gets any worse.
It started showing up about a month ago
The bubbles you can see in this shot are what scared me into thinking it might be Dinoflagellates If you can ID it please let me know, right now I'm keeping my fingers crossed it's just brown algae.
Here was my plan of attack:
Did a 20% Water change
Reduced feeding (I love feeding my corals... too much)
Cleaned out Carbon/GFO reactor and replaced with new media
Vacuumed visible algae from sand bed
Bought a few more snails (Nassarius & Turbos)
Cleaned out Kalk reactor and replaced with new media (I've read kalkwasser helps precipitate phosphate)
Moved most of my corals off of the sand bed to rocks (Too many corals cluttering up the sand was creating a lot of water flow dead spots)
Started running my Skimmer a little more "wet"
All the Acans scattered in the sand were causing algae build up in between them
Out of the sand, cleaned up, mounted to rocks and most importantly happy! I also did this with all of my polyp frags
I'm hoping that if I keep this up and stay on top of maintenance the problem will clear up soon.
Here it is after the first cleaning
Whatever it is I treating it like it's the plague. Another round of substrate sucking night, all this playing around in the sand is making me feel like a Jawa.