Aquarium Madness

I’ve been battling some red algae issue in my 75 gallon salt water tank recently. I’m thinking of removing a large portion of the live rock from my tank.

The main reasoning for doing this is that I figure the live rock is the one part of the tank that I have a hard time cleaning or keeping clean. I can’t seem to get any of my bottom feeding critters to do much with the red algae. The bottom feeders eat everything in the tank but the one thing that I do not want to have in the tank.

Pulling the live rock from the tank would allow me to completely clean the substrate over the course of a couple weeks. I’d clean the substrate slowly. I might just pull maybe 80% of my live rock only. That way I can keep a few pieces in the the tank for fish to hide around. It’d also be easier to maintain.

I just don’t want to stress the fish too much.

Recently I have been battling a bout of red algae in my tank. I’m pretty sure that it is just due to a combination of many things. I have ramped up the following maintenance tasks to try to alleviate this red algae attack:

• Water changes with gravel vacuuming once a night. 5 gallons of water swapped out of 75 gallons total. I hit a small portion of the gravel each night and vacuum thoroughly.
• Frequent filter changes and cleaning. I am thinking I need to replace my cannister filtration, or at least upgrade it. More on that later.
• Frequent glass cleaning. I’m thinking if I keep algae from growing on the aquarium glass, that’s one less issue that contributes.

I’m going to put on the full attack to rid my tank of this annoying red slime algae.

Well, I am now on day two of my most recent aquarium water change project.

I decided last night to do a 40 percent water change on the tank. I wanted to do a large water swap. The reason for wanting the large water swap was that I wanted to use the gravel vacuum to pull all kinds of junk out of the tank. It was about time for a large maintenance maneuver such as that.

At the same time I also shuffled some of the live rock around in the tank to remove a cave that was hidden towards the back of the tank. After moving live rock, there was some gravel that I wanted to clean.

Algae Removal

I am hoping that sucking some of the red algae out of the tank will promote less algae growth. I have the algae growth under control pretty well, but I want to continue to attack anything that could cause algae overgrowth in the tank.

The cleanup crew that consists of a few hermit crabs and a few snails keeps most of the aquarium debris collection at bay, but I need to attack aquarium debris with my own methods at times as well.

The Continuation

I had pulled about 20 gallons of water out of the tank yesterday, added 10 and then let it sit overnight. I didn’t have enough water on hand to fill the tank up fully. I use an RO/DI water filtration system to purify the tank water, and it runs very slow. It takes about 3 hrs to get a full 5 gallons of water from my faucet.

Because of the slow water filtration, if I don’t have any water on hand I have to wait for it. Tonight I have the remaining 10 gallons ready to go into the tank.

My water change project will then be complete.