Reef Discussion

[Darkspartan]

So since the crash about 6 weeks ago I was seeing a real improvement, corals were coming out besides goni. I purchased some mushrooms and zoanthids which were doing well. On my way home I bought some zoas and activate carbon. I get home and cyano is everywhere again! It looked horrible. I was doing really well and was only getting minimal parts.... everything is looking so sad and I now have no salt water to do a water change. A little worried now about the zoanthids that I bought today...

I think my phosban reactor is clumping up.... and detritus is everywhere! So think I just made a big mistake....

I got a tooth brush and scrubbed the crap out of my rocks and lifted some rocks.... that were affected.... crap everywhere and probably wasnt a good idea....

Any tips guys? I dont have any fresh salt water.. Dont have a spare tank to take all my live rock, corals and fish out to angrily get rid of my sandbed and crap.

*Sigh* Having a bad reef day and not knowing if my flow is too much or too little etc. Cant get any salt water from aquaristic till wednesday.

Really struggling to get this tank back up and running and looking good. Thought I had it going well again.
I dont know whether I should go to bunnings buy a big tub and go get some natural salt water from coogee. Put the live rock, fish and corals in it.... chuck out the sandbed. Give the tank a good scrub down....

Or I can go and get natural salt water and simply bring it back to suck out all the detritus...

Really need some advice and anyone local to Alexandria can always pop over and see my mess of a tank.... haha

the beauties I bought today are sadly sitting in the bag waiting to be put in the tank...

 

[Darkspartan]

Alkalinity: 9
Calcium: NA
Phosphate: 0.08
Salinity: 1.025
Temperature: 26
Size: 70L
Age: 12 months
Top Up: non RODI
Type: reef
Problem Started: 6 weeks ago. Had under control but just went nuts.
Water Changes: for the last six weeks have been doing weekly and biweekly changes.

 

[MagicJ]

Hi mate

Do you have a Tank Journal? I couldn't find any details of your tank anywhere..

The cyno is an indicator of water quality issues and/or inadequate water flow so dumping you sand bed is not going to solve the problem. I have a bit of cyno in my tank at the moment, as I am sure everyone else has at some stage, so the best suggestion at this stage is don't go out and do something drastic.

It can take a while, but with large regular water changes I am sure that you will get on top of it.

Now:

• the corals you bought today are better off in the tank, than out of it - acclimatise them slowly and put them in now.
• the phosban reactor - why is this clumping?? Inadequate flow through the reactor? Phosban needs replacing? Tell me some more...
• arrange to get as much saltwater on Wednesday as you can. Syphon out as much of the crap as you can and replace with new water.
• don't buy any more livestock until this is sorted ;)

Can you provide some more details of your tank, including any test results that you have done.

Cheers

 

[Darkspartan]

Thank you very much MagicJ!

I just went and grabbed about 100L of natural salt water. I've begun to get rid of the detritus. The sand bed and live rock are full of it. I didn't realise how bad it was.

So I bought a big tub anyway. So it wouldnt be a good idea to basically put the live rock into the tub and stock with lighting, pumps, etc with water then clean out the old sand bed replace with a finer grade sand and cycle it again with some live rock? then put all the stock in again?

 

[chimaera]

Sounds like the tank perhaps wasn't fully cycled and you bought stock a bit too soon. Did you get zeros for your ammonia, nitrite and nitrate for a couple of weeks before stocking? If not, could be that something died (maybe on the live rock) that has triggered a new cycle and everything is suffering because of it.

As Magic says, change as much water as you can and do that regularly for a while. Test the basics again, ammonia, nitrite, nitrate - forget about alk etc for now.

 

[Darkspartan]

Hey Chimaera. This is a tank thats been up for about 12 months or so now. Went on holidays for 2 weeks and left family to look after it. Got back and it was crashing. So ive been fighting to fix it since. I just bump the sand bed and heaps of crap comes out. I've got my tank journal on masa. It was going fantastically till after the holiday. So no water change was done. I had a 2 to 3 inch sand bed. I think it was a time bomb waiting to happen.

 

[Darkspartan]

Nitrates are at 0 (tested yesterday). over the last few weeks ive been getting the PO4 levels from 0.36 to 0.08 (0.08 tested yesterday).

Alk is at 9.8 Ph at 8.4.

There is just so much crap in the sandbed. I have a nassarius snail that does stir it.

 

[chimaera]

Hey Chimaera. This is a tank thats been up for about 12 months or so now. Went on holidays for 2 weeks and left family to look after it. Got back and it was crashing. So ive been fighting to fix it since. I just bump the sand bed and heaps of crap comes out. I've got my tank journal on masa. It was going fantastically till after the holiday. So no water change was done. I had a 2 to 3 inch sand bed. I think it was a time bomb waiting to happen.

Ah sorry, I misread, thought you had started it 6 weeks ago.

TJ for others to reference and help: http://www.masa.asn.au/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=144&t=239628

 

[chimaera]

With your 100L, I would change 40-50L today siphoning out as much crap as you can, then 30L tomorrow and 20-30L the day after, same process each time.

You have damsels and clowns by the look? They are hardy enough to cope with the large water changes, as is the remaining coral you have in there.

 

[Darkspartan]

No worries. I am only using about 30g of rowaphos in the reactor.

So progress update: Did a water change and syphoned out as much of the random crap and also removed part of another 25% of the sandbed. I am thinking that maybe its just not fine enough.

Also, just noticed that one of the big pieces of zoanthid rock that i purchased has a small acro attached...... had no idea. Usually this would be great. Any ideas on the chances?

 

[Darkspartan]

Ok, great. Will focus on doing that.

So if the reactor is removing the phosphates from the water column and then the water column balances by leeching the phosphate out of the rock?

Maybe it is the flow that is making my mushrooms etc hide away. If the nitrates and phosphates are relatively low.... I added some rowacarbon today as well.

 

[Fishy]

http://saltaquarium.about.com/od/nitratecontrol/ss/sbsnitratereduction_2.htm

Based on nitrate reduction, but gives you some relevance of water changes...

 

[MagicJ]

Do you have one of those syphon devices that they use in freshwater tanks?

They don't cost very much and can help to get a lot of the detritus out of the sand without harming the beneficial bacteria too much. I use one of these occasionally.

You seem to want to remove the sandbed - can you post up a picture of what you have? If you really want to then now is the time to do it - then you can take your time getting everything setup the way you want to. But don't do it just because it looks crap now :)

The acro may survive but it will probably turn brown - it may recover in the future if proper conditions are provided.

 

[Darkspartan]

I had one then I left it near my car the other month and it was stolen haha.

The new corals are all open and seem to be doing great for some reason. Will take some pics of the tank in general. Hopefully I can tackle this issue and get it back.

 

[Fishy]

Hang in there.... Water changes, vacuuming and general maintenance should see you get on top of the scenario...we have all been there at some stage.

 

[chrispc66]

Hello...

I have read about your recent problems on the other forum. It appears this small volume tank is pretty much a full time job since it kicked off. One thing I noticed was the small power head you use for flow. This is the prime reason for detritus build up, to a point where the cycle cannot keep up, NO3 spikes and problems occur.

I believe this coincided with your recent absence for two weeks and the issue was left for too long. My recommendations FWIW....

1) Set up your tub with fresh NSW....use a bucket with NSW and wash off all your rock, rinse and repeat, place in tub.
2) Remove all your substrate and wash out the tank. Place the rinsed rock and corals in the bare bottom DT and top off with NSW. Don't worry about salinity yet, until you get a RODI unit.
3) Purchase a decent power head like a sicce, (good value), or splurge out on A MP10 or Tunze or copy model
4) Keep up 100% water changes each week until you have RODi for FW top off and a decent skimmer.

Obviously other equipment is necessary over time, heater / chiller maybe / sump / etc...but at least with this suggestion your corals will love and detritus will be gone. Once you have a good skimmer and RODi unit you can reduce water changes to 50% or less weekly.

Small tanks do require regular large water changes and a higher maintenance regime based on small water volume where things can get bad quick.....consider a tank / sump with a minimum 300 L to provide improved stability.

God luck, I admire your dedication, I sincerely hope things go well for you.

 

[Darkspartan]

Hey everyone! Thank you for all the help! I really appreciated the other night!

Update. The cyano is only coming back a little. Mushrooms and zoanthids are closed up. One set of zoanthid comes out about half the day then closes up the rest. One set of mushrooms has small white growths coming off it unfortunately and another set of mushrooms seems absolutely fine. GSP are out in full glory.

So im a tad confused on the zoanthids and the other mushrooms. The duncan coral is out in full glory as well.

 

[Damjan]

Hay sorry to hear about your tank troubles. I just thought I would give you my 2c worth. Firstly I would have to agree with Chrisspc66 that you may need to up your flow. Detritus settling on the LR is the first sign that you need more flow to remove this settlement and get it through the filter. Secondly what test kits are you using? When I first started in this hobby I used API and was amaized that people had nitrate and phosphate issues as me test kits always came back 0ppm. Then I started having similar issues to you in that I started having cyano patched popping up everywhere. Everyone was telling me that I had nutrient issues and this was the course for the outbreak. I didn't believe them as my tests always came back negative. I would siphon it out only to find it back the next day. It was only when I went and bought a Red Sea test kit that it really hit home. nitrate was 10ppm and phos was 0.2. The other thing to mention is that cyano also uses these nitrate and phos. so in reality the figures were higher than the readings I was getting. Another important factor is silicate. This is usually introduces by using tap water as top up or a a sand bed high in silicate. A good way to help reduce cyano is to use a good skimmer and run AC as this will reduce organics in the water which cyano feed on as well as raise the oxygen level in the water column. Creating some surface agitation will also help.

I have noticed that you sand bed is very deep which and this will only cause issues as a 2-3 inch sand bed will catch detritus and however is not deep enough to give you the befit or denitrification as this will usually require a finer grade sand which is at least 4 inches deep. My advice would be to keep doing water changes remove some of the sand and up your flow whilst creating surface agitation and only use RO for top up. The reason I suggest these things is that once I implemented this in my tank it only took 2 months and the changes were drastic. I managed to combat cyano and fish and corals looked healthier and much happier.

Sorry for the essay but hope it helps. Good luck with it all and hope it all and keep us updated.

 

[Darkspartan]

Hey Damjan. Thank you for your reply!

I bought two wave maker things from guppies aquarium the other week. 2500l/ph. I dont know if its too much water flow.

Unfortunately the petshop i was getting water from does not do RODI water. Where is the best place to buy a unit? Or where is the best place to get RODI water from a store?

I lost alot of bristle stars, bristle worms and snails during the bad period. Anyone know anyone with spare snails, bristle stars or worms without having to buy lots of new live rock?

 

[MagicJ]

@Darkspartan

Have a look at this thread http://www.thereefuge.com.au/threads/special-offer-from-psi-water-filters-ro-di-water-filters.322/ :)

Also @callum@psi is a member here and will answer any of your questions.