Dinoflagellates , A Fail(my bad) and recovery

[darrrenjmartin]

The bubble snot just exploded overnight.
I never had a these in my tank since I started in the 1990’s. I thought it was in the new food purchase. I sucked and flushed and sucked and flushed repeat daily. Zero nutrients. Being a 90 , I flushed the whole thing weekly. I have seven stage ro micron micron carb carb tfc mixed mixed.
Bought 36w uv. Kz coral snow/cyanremove and dr tims.
I was making real progress after 6 weeks but it was still there. The only thing left was assume the ro water was somehow bad. The di indicated half. It had been a year since I changed ro medias and tfc. I ordered a refresh during the brs sale. i added a third DI for anion cation mixed.
installed a cheap tds 3 lead.
my tfc failed. 40 in 40 out. Meaning the carbon exhausted..
The di media was still kinda working at 2 tds.
After the first 10% wc the growth stopped.
Atlanta water tds 40 tfc 2 di 0

Before the bloommacaboom , there was no sign of any new algae growth, minus a spot of cyan. I was using vibrant so maybe its so good at its job there was a cover up.
It certainly wasnt because my nutrients were to low.

 

[sharis100]

This is why it is always good to check your RODI TDS routinely as well as when things go wacky. Also, changing out the cartridges and DI should be part of routine maintenance. Everybody’s system is different. But if you are monitoring you can get a good feel as to when it is needed. And typically for most folks at least a minimum of annually if not more.
most folks get good results raising their tank temperature to help fight dinos as well as water changes and increased CUC.

 

[darrrenjmartin]

Seems important to share fails. Being an habitual observator, minimalist and diyer, as was the nessessity back in the 1980's by-cracky. Witnessed the sunrise and coined berlin method " blasenrohr" in Deutschland, when I was in the navy in the mid 80's. Soon after, built my own pinwheel tandum pump venturi skimmer in 1989.
This fail was a spectacularly unique one for me.
I have had the same RO rig for 30yrs under the obligitory "annual" with no fails. (I change the carbon bi-annually and the two mixed di canister were at half sauration ).
The carbon must have saturated in an ATL water contamination event when the chlorine was jacked up.
something was getting through the di. I changed to cation anion mixed canistors for future indication of impurities.

Yes, the TDS is a cool piece of inexpensive quanative data and essential to prevent this particular fail in 30yrs.
Another fitting and chance for a leak and contamination

heres an analogy.... The good conscientious kid who gets slammed by the lone scrap with justice system as opposed to the kid in which its a habit and plays the system