Dinoflagellates

I have recently been battling dinoflagellates in my 120. I am running 500mL of Two Little Fishes NPX Biopellets but I am not dosing a bacteria product. I reduced my photo-period to 5 hours for the metal halides and 7 hours for the T5's. My skimmer has overflowed three times in the past two weeks which dumped nutrients back into the display. I am currently testing the new Vertex Generation 3 skimmer pump on my skimmer instead of the Bubble Blaster 3000, so far the skimmate production is much more stable and is almost twice as much! Surprising for a $70 Vertex pump vs. a $205 Bubble Blaster pump. I covered the tank and turned the lights off for three days and once the lights came back on any algae and dinoflagellates on the rocks were gone! Now, four days later they are slowly coming back. I am now topping my tank off with kalkwasser to bump the pH up and I am giving H2O2 a try. I am going to dose 0.5mL of hydrogen peroxide per 10 gallons of tank water the first two days then bump up the dose to 1mL per 10 gallons. I am hoping this will knock out the dino's within a week. Just to make sure my top off water wasn't adding nutrients to my tank I decided to test it. My tap water has a TDS of 238ppm while my RO water is coming out at 2ppm and my DI is 0ppm. I tested the tank water and the PO4 is 0.05ppm (Hanna checker) but I there is a thread  on Reef2Reef about how even the Hanna checker values are flawed. My fresh RO water tested at 0.04ppm! I would have thought that the RO/DI unit would take out phosphates but I guess not.

NP Biopellets Update

The colors of the corals have increased dramatically since the addition of the NP Biopellets but the algae is still there and actually has worsened. The skimmate inside the skimmer has darkened and looks almost black. As you can see from this picture of my frag rack the algae has gone nuts. The rocks look clean but where the tangs and snails cannot get to the algae has taken over (aka. the nutrient levels haven't dropped yet with the addition of the Biopellets).

NP Biopellets

I am testing out the NP Biopellets to try and reduce my phosphate levels to 0.00 ppm, they are currently at 0.07 ppm according to the Hanna Phosphate Photometer and I still have hair algae growing on the overflow and on my frag rack. I added 500mL of the Biopellets in a Phosban 550 reactor powered by a Maxijet 900. The pellets look like vanilla chocolate chips and sink when placed in water. I will add 10 drops of Brightwell MB7 in front of the maxijet daily to help cultivate a bacteria population on the biopellets. I am starting with 500mL of Biopellets but in three to six months I will run a total of 1L of Biopellets.