i fought it for six months before i finally broke down and used a product called chemi clean. i have a full reef tank and was very concerned, but it worked great, got rid of it totally in two days, has never been back since, it also really clears up your water. i use it now about every two months just to clarify the water. it did not harm anything and worked great i highly recommend it. PS i tried everything and i mean everything this is the only thing that worked.
Ive had my 37 gallon, drilled with 15 gallon sump up for coming up on 4 months now. This past month ive been batteling cyano, really bad! Its covered the front portion of my sand bed, only the sand where theres light. Also now most my live rock is being completly covered by it. My tank specs are as follows:
37 gallon drilled
15 gallon sump
in the sump have chatamorpha algae growing
Aqua C remora protein skimmer
Ammonia 0
Nitrite 0
Nitrate .5ppm
Phosphates show up at 0 but who knows from all the cyano
salinity 1.025
ph 8.0
Ive tried increasing current where the cyano is appearing, but that didnt work. I though my old skimmer wasnt doing good job so bought an Aqua C remora which is actually pulling alot more. Any ideas on what to do? Dont want to treat with chemicals than i will just get a greater strain of cyano. I just ordered a live sand, mini stars, and worm kit from IPSF.com
I put a orange-spotted white sleeper goby and some extra emerald crabs in my 24G Nano-Cube that was having the same problem and that did the trick. I've also tried stirring up the sand bed or any other cyano infested areas just before doing a water change and syphoning out all I could catch into the waste water bucket. Mine is pretty clean now.
What do you have in your tank for livestock? Given it's a new tank, I would probably opt for medicating your tank (to be fair-- many others will disagree). Siphon out as much of the cyano as you can, then dose your tank for 7 days with Maracyn (Erythromycin). Use the recommended dose and make sure to use it for the full 7 days (i.e., don't stop treatment when the cyano dissapears in 3 days--this is how bacteria becomes resistant).
Make sure to turn off your skimmer for the treatment period (it will go haywire otherwise). Also, remove any activated carbon you may be running. At the end of the treatment period run activated carbon for a day or two before turning your skimmer back on.
I've not seen a thread here or elsewhere where this approach ended poorly.
Also, someone will inevitably reply that doing so will wipe out the beneficial bacteria in your tank causing it to go through another break-in cycle. This is a myth (I'll spare the medical details...unless you really care).
I should point out that while products to kill cyano do work, unless you have resolved to original problem, all you'll do is kill the red slime and get it quickly replaced by some other nuisance algae.
Use such products only as an absolute last resort. I know it looks terrible, but with good aquarium management, you can control it.
i think i am doing a good job on maintance. Water changes every 3 weeks, usuallly 20-30% with RO water. My water checks out good always, but still it just wont go away. I agree, i dont want to add chemicals to treat, because i believe it will just come back later. I need to find the source of it! Is the time PC bulbs go bad when you first start them? Or is it once you have them up in constant use? Because ive had my satelite fixture for about 8 months now, and ive turned it on back than to see if it worked. Could this be my cause of cyano? the bulbs might be old and giving off red? Ive treated once with EM tablets. Never killed it just turned it grayish, whitish, and grew back once treatment stopped after a week. I think the em tablets did kill off some of my biological bacteria because had a huge ammonia spike after treatment and had to do large water changes to get back down. Im syphoning it out about every 2 days now, because if dont you cant even tell i have rocks that are brown! And my sand bed is black! im loosing hope on beating it. The only thing i havent tried is different chemicals to kill it. Which i dont really want to do because i want to find the source of it. But im about to try some type of chemicals because im embarresed to even look at my tank. They critters i got in it also are:
corals:
pulsing xenia (dieing, i think due to the nasty starfish hitchhiker i had that is known to eat them)
waving hand xenia i think its called?
stripped mushroom
toadstool
finger leather
green star polyps
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