so it's the middle of the day and the lights are out on the new tank and the reason why
is i'm in the middle of a two to three day blackout due to dinos yes the dreaded dinos
i was not expecting to have that with this new tank i started this new tank with live rock so
i figured i'd have the biodiversity there is no sand in this tank so maybe that factors into
the equation i ran into this issue with my 187 gallon tank a few years ago i tried a whole bunch
of things the corals were just so stressed out that tank was started with dry rock i decided to
reboot that tank and use live rock along with live sand and the tank has been flourishing ever since
this tank is only seven months old so i guess it's still going through some growing pains really what
happened a couple of weeks ago as my nutrients bottomed out as much as i you know tried not
to have that happen they did the nitrates and the phosphates went down to zero for a couple of weeks
and what what i what i did was i i increased the feedings in the tank to try to combat that so i
fed the fish a lot more i also have a few corals in this tank some frags a couple of lps colonies
so i added some coral food really really up the feedings a lot and that's when i noticed the dinos
and that actually happened with the 187 gallon tank that's when i noticed the the dyno outbreak
is when i started dosing amino acids and and some other um coral food i don't know what what that
what that there's any parallels there if that's an indication but maybe it's an instability maybe
it was because i had zero nitrates and phosphates in this tank and i just started feeding a lot more
to increase the nitrates in the phosphates that something happened there was an unbalanced
impact and the dinos just took advantage of that and took over the tank but it got really bad
so i had to do something and the plan is to do a two to three day blackout and i want to be able to
do that because these dinos are photosynthetic that'll certainly stop them from growing but it
will also cause them to go into the water column i have a microscope and i believe i id'd the type of
dinos that will go into the water column when the lights are out which is key if you have a
uv sterilizer which i'll talk about in a minute but anyway what i wanted to do was i i stopped
you know over feeding the fish and dosing the coral foods and i started
dosing nitrates and phosphates i know you can increase the nitrates and phosphates
by just feeding the fish a lot more but i feel like i have more control by doing precise dosing
so at this point my nitrates and phosphates are at levels that i'm happy with my nitrates are between
5 to 10 parts per million and the phosphates are around 0.1 parts per million so let me go into the
sump room and i will show you the main device that i'm going to use to attack these buggers
so this is an aqua uv 57 watt uv sterilizer and my hope in conjunction with the blackout
is to be able to zap those guys and i've got the pump in the skimmer compartment the sump right
here as you can see i've got a valve on in case i decide to crank back on the flow but right now
it's probably pumping at about i don't know 1 000 gallons per hour which is the minimum
that is required for this uv sterilizer to zap organisms like dinos so i'll um i'll throttle it
back even more if it doesn't seem to be working because i've read that the dinos you know if
you're using uv sterilizer that the lower the flow the better but i don't want to go below the
manufacturer's recommendations right now i'm just afraid about burning the uh the bulb anyway so
you know i mentioned that the pump drawing the water is in the main
skimmer compartment the output for the uv is going into the couple of compartments downstream of that
into the bathroom where i have the uh the heater so that should be good right you don't want to
have the output going into the same compartment there you're drawing the input you want to have
it downstream so i believe that's a good setup a good solid setup in terms of the uv so that is the
plan of attack what i also did was i siphoned out a lot of the dinos in the tank good thing is that
it this is a bare bottom tank so it was very easy to get them off of the uh the bottom part of the
tank and the glass i also siphoned them off of the rocks and blew them off with a turkey base as well
to get them into the water column to help the uv sterilizer along in its quest to zap all of them
so that is it i will um keep you folks updated and i would love to hear your comments so
please chime in if you have any feedback or advice in terms of my battle with
dinos well many thanks for watching and if you liked the video please give
it a thumbs up and hit that subscribe button if you haven't done so already
i'll put links to marine depot and a reef bomb in the video description below see you next time