95% rip clean

[Oregon Grown Reef]

I've been so excited to share this experience with everyone here, but first a little backstory.

I have a sumpless 50 gallon reef that's been up and running for just over 4 years. At one point of my journey I got aefw, likely from a wild acro colony I got from my LFS. I tried battling it for awhile, but all of the corals were glued down and there were a lot of them. All but a few of them died. I had 70 corals of various types, acros making up roughly half of them at one point and now there are 14 total, 4 being acros (I either sold or got rid of the rest). The tank also had a bad bubble algae problem that I would get under control and then it would explode again. After losing so many coral so quickly in this tank and my other tank crashing shortly after due to heavy metal buildup, I stopped doing regular maintenance. Well, that's when things got out of hand. The bubble algae came back in force, the detritus was building up, there was dead coral all over the tank, and I couldn't bring myself to do anything about it because it felt like all of my years of testing and learning was for nothing.

Fast forward to the beginning of this year... My wife got covid while on vacation over the Christmas holiday, and I had nothing to do with my time. The doctor said I had to quarantine for 10 days even though I tested negative because I could potentially spread due to being re-exposed every time I went home. I sat there looking at the tank in disgust and decided now is the time for change. I'll admit though that I started doing more regular maintenance on my other tank and after watching it bounce back, it made me a little more confident going into this. I knew I had to get my hands wet and apply soelme elbow grease, so I made a bunch of water and decided to do a rip clean (or as much of one as I could). From here on, I'll let the pictures do most of the talking.


These were taken before I did the work. As you can tell there's a large amount of detritus on the bottom, algae growing, dinos starting to poke its head through, xenia taking over the rocks, and a purple monti that I tried to remove, failed, and then it grew into the monster it was, also killing a couple of acros.

 

[Oregon Grown Reef]

So began the work. I scraped off as much algae and xenia off the rocks as I could. I know how difficult it is to remove xenia, so I expected to have to possible do this again on a smaller scale once some of it has grown back and I can see what I missed. I cut off most of the dead coral skeletons and COMPLETELY removed the monti. I cut off and chiseled away at the rock underneath it to be certain it wouldn't come back. The zoas were also a mistake, so I removed every trace of them. They hopped on from an old rock and grew out of control. They could probably be kept in freshwater and thrive...

These were a couple of colonies I took in for store credit. The tank was also overcrowded on the bottom, so I had to remove a few.

 

[Nate Chalk]

Looks good better than my tank even

 

[Oregon Grown Reef]

After removing most of the rock, the official water change could commence. I sucked out most of the detritus out of the bottom. I would have removed all of it, but there was too much and I needed to keep enough in the tank for the fish. I had some enough water to remove the rest, but I was also on a time crunch. I had some rocks with yumas on them and various other corals that I consider pests due to how they can over grow or pop up on the other side of the tank next to a really nice wild rainbow lobo to potentially sting it and...sorry...where was I? Oh yeah, so I had to take them to the LFS as well.

After removing all of the detritus, this is what was left in the container. Keep in mind this isn't all of it as a ton of it went down the drain with the water.

 

[Oregon Grown Reef]

Now we're getting to the good stuff. This is the next morning after doing everything. I redid the rockscape slightly, but enough to where I'm extremely happy with it. This allowed me to also create more space between the rocks and the front and back panels so I could adjust my powerhead placement in the back closer to the bottom to keep things suspended for the hob filter to suck up or to blow it to the front. There was still a bunch of detritus, but it was starting to pile in one spot in the front which means removing future detritus buildup will be much easier.

The water is cloudy because I blew off the rocks as I still had another 10 gallons of new water at this point to remove the rest of the detritus.

 

[Oregon Grown Reef]

And now fast forward to today. This is after installing an oase biomaster 250 yesterday, that I got with the credit for the corals I brought in, to further help pull that stuff out of the water column. The detritus wound up building up right in the front where I can easily get rid of it.

As you can see, it's a little better than before. The rocks are so white because they either were chipped off aggressively (thanks monti) or turned upside down to better fit the scape now. I can't wait for them to be covered with coraline. The last few pictures show that there's no detritus underneath the rocks anymore.

 

[Oregon Grown Reef]

Bonus content:

2 old pics of the tank in its glory days.

Some pics of my favorite corals in the tank. Taken today and yesterday.

 

[Acros]

I am getting ready to do a progressive rip clean. 20% water changes everyday with sand bed removal. I hate dinos.

I plan on adding the sand back slowly after the dinos are gone and the sand is throughly clean.

 

[Oregon Grown Reef]

I am getting ready to do a progressive rip clean. 20% water changes everyday with sand bed removal. I hate dinos.

I plan on adding the sand back slowly after the dinos are gone and the sand is throughly clean.

I know some people don't want to shock the system, but in my opinion my tank was on the verge of death already, so it needed something drastic and everything is looking much better than before. In all actuality, nothing done was harmful to the tank and only good things could come of it as I only removed detritus, algae, and unwanted corals. A large 90% water change was done so there could be shock in that aspect, but I'm prepared to deal with any consequences, if any.

Edit: I was still thinking of it under my circumstances. I have a barebottom tank and the tank is small compared to many others, so this may not be feasible. I'd be interested to see how yours turns out!

 

[Oregon Grown Reef]

I plan on adding the sand back slowly after the dinos are gone and the sand is throughly clean.

One more thing, if you plan on adding it back, is there a plan to keep it clean so you don't go through this again? Sand is a huge pain to clean thoroughly, which is why I don't have any now. I may put sand in a tank in the future, but 10 gallons and under only. Once you've progressively removed the sand, the tank doesn't need it anymore. I understand liking it, and I do think it looks better when kept well, but I'm not able to remove all of the detritus from the it in a 5 gallon water change.

 

[Acros]

My source of dinos was me being impulsive with chemical treatments, and the tank is only six months old.

I plan to add nassarius snails and hope they turn the sand. When the tank is stable, I only change 20% water a month and dose TM AFR.