Dr Tim's Waste Away and Refresh to Beat Cyanobacteria

My nemesis is back, and this time I decided to use Dr. Tim's Waste Away and Refresh to Beat Cyanobacteria. Honestly, it wasn't as successful as I would have hoped. I followed it down to the letter and it still didn't beat it. Time for good old Chemiclean to come to the rescue, again.

[@atfinthehouse8631]

Thought you’d try the natural patient way with tiger fighting conches, and other critters.
I did a recent 2 dose of Red slime remover, 1 dose to start, aerate tank with air stone, then repeated in 48 hours. All gone.
Since I introduced a tiger tail sea cucumber and a few tiger conches a year or so ago, my display has had none. I’ve used Dr Tim waste away gels, microbacter 7 and continuum M in a bunch of my tanks to keep things working too.

[@shallowreefing]

I think I need more conches. I only have 1 in the tank right now. More may help it out!

[@JeepinReefer406]

Ugh so frustrating man. I feel you. My thoughts on your situation are, reduce your phosphates and forget about the ratio you are looking to keep. It's not working for your tank. The sand is acting as a phosphate trap and the cyano is feeding off of it.
Possible solutions include reduce your phosphates to .01-.03 consistently with Nitrates in the same range they are now. If you don't have snails, you could try conchs. They eat diatoms and cyano in my tanks. Or you could get rid of as much sand as possible. You should have good bacteria load after this treatment. Good luck! I look forward to seeing your progress on this.
One other thing, have dosed live phyto and pods on a regular basis? Doing this one thing has had the biggest impact for me on nusense issues. Just a thought!

[@shallowreefing]

I haven’t tried phytoplankton yet. I do have a conch and a bunch of nassarius snails. I’m always on the quest to get lower phosphates. I like your ideas. I may try phytoplankton in the future.

[@alwaystmoza]

Great video,, works a treat , you're supposed to syphon most of it out first not leave the sand bed full of it that's why didn't work 100%

[@alwaystmoza]

Need to syphon it all at the start i had it worse on my 1000 litre tank and worked great.

[@shallowreefing]

Cyano is definitely a multi pronged approach. I got it again. I’m trying another method. Haha one day I’ll be able to let everyone know the best methods for cyano.

[@fletcherwright7042]

I've used Dr. Tim's refresh and waste away for dino and if you have them bad repeat it. It works for me never used it for cyanobactor

[@shallowreefing]

That’s good to know!

[@TheJimjimmy12]

You should have done a full black out for the first 4 days. It would have all been gone in that time

[@shallowreefing]

Yeah. In later videos I talk about my problems with only using one method.

[@atfinthehouse8631]

You didn’t seem to blow the cyano off the sandbed, rocks and corals either to get it in the water column to remove as well.

[@shallowreefing]

Yeah I didn’t film the blowing it off the rocks. The video was 30 minutes and I cut it down by 7 😂. I’m really trying to give a full detail of what I do but at some point no one wants to watch a 30 minute video of bacteria dosing.

[@playschool50]

Wont chemiclean kill off good bacteria? Maybe chemiclean first then doc tims to build up good bacteria to fight back any future break outs?

[@shallowreefing]

I agree with you on that one. The more I have done Chemiclean the more I lean to pumping in good bacteria after Chemiclean wipes out everything.

[@hydrocontainergardening]

Nothing happens fast in a reeftank.

[@shallowreefing]

Ain’t that the truth!

[@fletcherwright7042]

I didn't use the skimmer for the whole treatment

[@shallowreefing]

The bottle says to turn the skimmer off for 8-12 hours. But the card says 2-4. There is a discrepancy for sure. So the first time I did 4 hours. Then the next dose I did 12

[@na1du]

What's your ORP?

[@shallowreefing]

I don’t have a probe to measure it.

[@paulalord710]

Try cyno rx next time

[@stephenbrown9998]

No