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.
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.