Crushed Coral?

[Headlessnwalkin]

About 10 yrs ago I went for crushed coral bottom instead of sand. Why I dont know other than I was young and it was the cheaper route of the two. The problem I am having is I have a 55gal. With guess about 125ish in LR. And it is pretty hard to clean good, due to not much room. Should I lose some rock? Or should I look into changing to live sand? So my critters can do more work Or get a SSgobie that could assist. I am finally getting into the reef stage after many yrs. And would like to be cleaner. Ive got shrooms, zoas, pulsing and long exenia, gsp, medusa corals and orange and red monti caps. Everything is doing great except for the monti. Its starting to bleach out.

 

[swannyson7]

Switching to sand would probably allow for an increased diversity of organisms in your substrate and slightly more efficient biological filtration. However, with that much liverock in your tank, your biological filtration should be working pretty well due to the bacteria living within the porous rock. What size are the grains of crushed coral? I'm not sure that a sand sifter gobie would be able to handle the larger grains of crushed coral being excreted through its gills, so I'm not sure that I'd advise that route. What types of mechanical filtration are your running in your tank? The shrooms, zoas, xenia and GSP all tolerate nutrient rich systems, while the montipora is less forgiving of poor water quality. Can you list your parameters so that we can trace the cause of your monti bleaching?

 

[Headlessnwalkin]

The crushed coral is actually pretty small but not sand size. Yes my water quality is probably the problem. Im not a water changer but im in the proccess to start. I only fill evaporated water and yes im still using tap. But I know its important at this point so I will be making the switch to buying ro/di water from LFS. To start water changes which brought the question about the little surface area I have. I do have a little bit of purple velvet algae on three smaller rocks. But other than that I never had any problems with this system. I am using 48" coralife 50/50 65x2 and a 24" Glo t5 ho 24x2, HOB emperor filter, aquarium systems skimmer with with maxi-jet 1200 pump. Nothing to special but it has worked for me so far. And the monti has been starting to regain color.

 

[swannyson7]

FWIW, I'd look into purchasing an RO/DI filter. Buying the water from the LFS gets expensive quick and you can't be sure of how often they are changing out their filters. If you've got a bit of algae than I'd suspect that excess nutrients are part of your problem. Perhaps you could look into running some sort of phosphate removal media (preferably in a reactor) to cut down on the excess nutrients.

 

[Headlessnwalkin]

Yeah I know it will get expensive over time but at this point with my lady in school still and mortgage and everything else coming from me its all I can do. I know nothing about reactors are they pretty expensive?

 

[swannyson7]

I know nothing about reactors are they pretty expensive?

You can pick up a cheap upflow reactor for under $50 and can often find them used much cheaper. Basically it is just a acrylic cyclinder that holds media with a tube that feeds incoming water to the bottom of the reactor and allows it to escape from the top after passing through the media. It's a very simple device, but is much more efficient than running the media in a bag in the sump. They're also great for running things like carbon or solid vodka dosing pellets.