cyano battle lol

[wreck]

Well cyano is gone. Nitrates after a 20 gallon wc are 10 ppm. Skimmer is bonkers loll.

How long should I wait to do another wc?

[wreck]

Well cyano is gone. Nitrates after a 20 gallon wc are 10 ppm. Skimmer is bonkers loll.

How long should I wait to do another wc?

[darkreef]

25% ever 24 hours over three days then start pouring out the skimmer in the sink till it returns to normal. That's what I did anyways . I also blew my rocks off each time to get the dead stuff the cyano had suffocated into the siphon . Then cleaned any power heads , return pumps and glass.

Then have fun preventing it from coming back ...
I don't have a lick of algae but I still get carpets of cyano if I'm not carefull

Forgot to dip a frag a few weeks ago bam out break

I'm so sick of dosing that I just manually fight it.. Sick of loosing skimmers

[brotherd]

Well, well, well. Guess who is having a re visit with cyano. Good times...not.

[darkreef]

I just beat it without using chemicals !! One week cyano free

[wreck]

Im close to a week now aswell.

[asylumdown]

I know in forum world this thread is getting long in the tooth, but I want to add that I also appear to have beat cyano. Also, I want to walk back further some elements of my earlier criticisms of bacterial supplementation.

1 - I did a two course back to back treatment of chemiclean, and that appears to have wiped the cyano completely out.

2 - I started using MB7 right after the chemiclean treatment using the 'start up dose', which in my tank works out to approx 70-75ml of MB7 a day. Let me tell you that burns through a bottle right quick. Earlier I had said that I was suspicious over whether or not anything was actually alive in those bottles, but after dosing such large amounts of MB7 I've noticed some novel changes in my tank - first, my glass has been getting coated in this hazy, hard to wipe off film. Not your normal film algae, but something that seems more tenacious. It builds up quickly, going from crystal clear to looking hazy sometimes overnight. It takes quite a bit of persistence with the magfloat to get it off. Also, my skimmer's behaviour has completely changed. It's hard to really describe, but the foam column is much taller than it used to be. I've had to dial it way back because it now overflows if I set the water height in the same place I used to. The past two times I've cleaned the skimmer cup, the neck of it has been coated in this thick, whitish/clear slime that peels off of it in sheets below the line where the actual brownish/black skimmate gunk starts. It's strangely difficult to get off, you need to rub really hard near the edge of it to get a strip you can peel off started, it doesn't dissolve away like normal skimmer gunk just by running your fingers over it. That's never happened before.

I have to assume that those two changes, both on the glass, and in the skimmer, are bacterial biofilms. I've never had them before, and they's so obviously different from what I'm used to seeing in my tank I have to conclude they're coming from the heavy dosing of MB7, as other than the killing the cyano that's the only thing I've changed. There's obviously something living in what I'm dosing. It's kind of a PITA (it took me over 10 minutes to clean the skimmer cup last night when it normally only takes 3), so I'm hoping it stops happening once I go down to the normal 'maintenance' dose of MB7 (which should be soon, I didn't actually note the date when I started. Oops).

On the 3rd day of my two part chemi-clean treatment, measurable phosphates in my tank spiked to 0.05ppm, which leads me to believe that the cyano had sequestered a fair amount of it and was consuming nutrients before my GFO/pellet reactor could get to it. Some of my 'coal mine canary' corals also rapidly began browning out. I've been changing my GFO weekly since to drive the phosphate levels as low as possible and now most corals are back to their 'low nutrient' colours, and I'm consistently testing 0.00 phosphate on the hanna checker with no cyano growth anywhere in the tank.

We'll see if it ever comes back, a couple weeks obviously isn't a very good predictor of success, but so far so good.

[zhasan]

I've also been hit hard with Cyano and was trying to lower my nutrients to get rid of it. My nitrates are at zero now, however the phosphate levels are still high.

I plan on using chemiclean to get rid of Cyano and then change up the media quantity of GFO (I think I was very conservative with GFO media I used initially).

I'll keep you posted on my success and faliure as I progress!!

[Reef Pilot]

Originally Posted by asylumdown

I have to assume that those two changes, both on the glass, and in the skimmer, are bacterial biofilms. I've never had them before, and they's so obviously different from what I'm used to seeing in my tank I have to conclude they're coming from the heavy dosing of MB7, as other than the killing the cyano that's the only thing I've changed. There's obviously something living in what I'm dosing. It's kind of a PITA (it took me over 10 minutes to clean the skimmer cup last night when it normally only takes 3), so I'm hoping it stops happening once I go down to the normal 'maintenance' dose of MB7 (which should be soon, I didn't actually note the date when I started. Oops).

Hmmm, have never seen that. Having said that, I haven't used the heavier dosage for a couple years now. But I would cut back the amount now and go to the low nutrient dosage, and then later half that again. Sounds like you have some kind of extra bio activity happening, though.

[asylumdown]

Yah I looked at the dates from the other thread, I think I'm almost exactly at 2 weeks. Today is the last day I'll do the heavy dose. The films are annoying, but the tank has never looked better so I can't complain too much.