Dirty tank - best way to clean it

melvis

Well-Known Member
As soon as the battle with red turf algae seems to be going in my favour, I realise I've taken my eye off the ball in terms of other maintenance and neglected to change my CPE and Purigen when they were due and now have cyano and GHA outbreak. New media is in and I'm researching algae scrubbers as a supplementary method to skimming etc.

All of that aside...my tank just never seems to look clean, the sandbed only seems to have been white once (at the beginning), my live rock just looks grim and the tank looks dull overall. I gently stir the sandbed, turkey baste the rocks and scrape the glass during my WC but any detritus stirred up just seems to resettle and add to the crap brown look. What's the best way of pulling this out?

I'm over a year in and compared to other tanks I see, I'm embarrassed at the way mine looks but would be interested to hear what you guys do as part of your cleaning regime.
 

Desmond

Well-Known Member
Do you have snails in you system ? My snails do most of the work for me. Clean alage from glass with a little help from me and turn over sandbed.If you have problems with Algae sounds like your p04 and n03 may be out of wack.
Out of interest do you use RO water or tap water ?
What are the test readings on your tank ?
You could siphon some of the dirt out when you scape but you have to be careful of doing this also.
 

melvis

Well-Known Member
Thanks for responding Desmond and yes, I do have snails but need to refresh the stock as a few seem to have passed lately. I definitely have problems with both p04 and n03 and about to do another WC, following on from Saturday's one. Going to try and do one every 4 days whilst I'm off work over Christmas. Always use RODI and as for readings, about to do them now and will post them when done.

May look into a conch as well.
 

mike1970

Active Member
when I had an algae break I used a brush, turkey baster and a net to catch some of the stuff floating around the tank.
 

DaveK

Well-Known Member
As for the tank looking clean. Consider that a reef system has a lot of life in it and it's all growing in your tank. I'd even go further and say that most people that have these perfect looking tanks either just set them up or really cleaned it up special for the photo shoot. Also, it takes a long time for a tank to become really stable. As you have seen, you can have a lot of algae issues and so on that first year.

Keep fighting the new algae, and in time your tank will be looking great.
 

Pat24601

Well-Known Member
It may just be my luck, but anytime I've had an algae issue, I've basically just upped my maintenance and chemical filtering for nutrients. Bigger water changes, Cpe, Purigen, phosnet.

The algae has then slowly died off and I haven't done anything special to remove it.

Except bubble algae. I can't get rid of that.

My sand never looks really white. Sometimes I siphon it really well and it looks white for a few days, but goes back to looking a bit dirty pretty quick. Mostly, I don't worry about it. People looking at my tank notice the fish and corals over the sand.
 
Top