Forum Challenge: link an example of a failed reef tank cycle from any post on the internet.

ggNoRe

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Hey Brandon I don't want do derail your thread but I am curious what would be your preferred method to start a new saltwater system? I have seen a lot of your posts and find your suggestions to make a lot of sense to me. I went the dry rock cured in a tub for 3 months with adding 3 different types of bottle bac and had a horrible dino and cyano experience. Trying to learn more about biomes and different methods to create stable diverse systems.
 
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brandon429

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why did you put a reef in that
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its no derail thanks for posting for sure. if we're going to claim there are no stalls then we ought to be able to apply the same rule to prep a tank cycle live time.

is it the case that you already have rocks submerged that long and fed with bottle bac? if so the cycle is done, regardless of what your test kit says regarding ammonia, nitrite and nitrate. you have 3 month submerged rocks ready to transfer into a new tank?
 
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brandon429

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why did you put a reef in that
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gotcha. we are well past nitrification concerns agreed. Truly I would do nothing different than you've done.

with that bottle bac added we can see in myriad threads that instant fish carry was available. but imagine having the dinos challenges while abutted in corals and anthias :)

your way here is best, hand clean off all surfaces before transfer if they have any invasion mass (its ok to spot clean directly on the rock with peroxide as a spot burn, it does not reset your cycle I've used it liberally and far more offensively for 10 years now in my system)

move no cyano or diatoms into the new system


*since you've had a small prediction of the invasion issues your environ selects for, consider some initial setup strategies in the new tank vs the classic stack and go:

-any risk of dinos is best met in a bare bottom tank. sand provides housing, insulation, feed, communal resource for dinos and bare bottom lets you assertively remove mass vs let it compile. Consider adding sand later, once you can verify selections in the new tank. You'd tap water rinse the new sand for hours, totally clean not 95% but 100% clean, final rinse in RO, then add this sand via pipe or bag drop into the situated reef. even with corals and fish truly cloudless sand you rinsed for two hours will not harm as a delayed addition it does what a snowglobe does, cloudlessly fall down into place.


-run your new setup on zero white lights or very low %, not the usual higher levels run more blues/the ugly windex look early on it'll help lower invasion power. change your whites as the months go by if you want, the tendency is to overpower new systems with way more light than needed, run your new setup dimmer and cleaner so that you can guide out the expected uglies, never permit an ugly display you did ideally here.
 

ggNoRe

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Thankfully I have "beat" all of these pest and the system is doing very well now. But it was a very painful process in which I lost about 80% of my corals. Just thinking to myself what I would do differently next time as using several different bottled bacteria did not get me the results I was hoping for. Guess live rock, mud, or sand may be the better solution for establishing biome?

BRS is doing a study on this exact thing right now. Am curious for their results.
 

LRT

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gotcha. we are well past nitrification concerns agreed. Truly I would do nothing different than you've done.

with that bottle bac added we can see in myriad threads that instant fish carry was available. but imagine having the dinos challenges while abutted in corals and anthias :)

your way here is best, hand clean off all surfaces before transfer if they have any invasion mass (its ok to spot clean directly on the rock with peroxide as a spot burn, it does not reset your cycle I've used it liberally and far more offensively for 10 years now in my system)

move no cyano or diatoms into the new system


*since you've had a small prediction of the invasion issues your environ selects for, consider some initial setup strategies in the new tank vs the classic stack and go:

-any risk of dinos is best met in a bare bottom tank. sand provides housing, insulation, feed, communal resource for dinos and bare bottom lets you assertively remove mass vs let it compile. Consider adding sand later, once you can verify selections in the new tank. You'd tap water rinse the new sand for hours, totally clean not 95% but 100% clean, final rinse in RO, then add this sand via pipe or bag drop into the situated reef. even with corals and fish truly cloudless sand you rinsed for two hours will not harm as a delayed addition it does what a snowglobe does, cloudlessly fall down into place.


-run your new setup on zero white lights or very low %, not the usual higher levels run more blues/the ugly windex look early on it'll help lower invasion power. change your whites as the months go by if you want, the tendency is to overpower new systems with way more light than needed, run your new setup dimmer and cleaner so that you can guide out the expected uglies, never permit an ugly display you did ideally here.
On point Brandon
Only thing I'd add to this is OP check all params. Make sure Phosphates and Nitrates are present. Its much easier to dose these things and totally control as opposed to overfeeding tank that is not ready to handle the extra bioload.
Keep everything as stabile and consistent as humanly possible. Long as Nutrients are present, ph and alk are at acceptable levels and remain consistent the tank should take care of itself from here.
I wouldnt even expect an ugly stage if done this way.
Dinos will most likely never come back.
 

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Thankfully I have "beat" all of these pest and the system is doing very well now. But it was a very painful process in which I lost about 80% of my corals. Just thinking to myself what I would do differently next time as using several different bottled bacteria did not get me the results I was hoping for. Guess live rock, mud, or sand may be the better solution for establishing biome?

BRS is doing a study on this exact thing right now. Am curious for their results.
Do you have a link for this study?
 
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brandon429

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hey check this one out, a rare gold post.



seneye reads normal, API reads blasted to the sky too high, classic duel of kits and which one do we believe is about to get referee'd as he has a running display tank to dip the seneye into to calibrate it. that's a gold post right there for the topic we study here: all stalled cycles come from the type of testing used, which ranges kit to kit in accuracy

even if we carry fish along with the initial bottle bac dose, cycles aren't stalling they're turning out fine. We have all been prepared for a failed cycle risk, yet none occur. amazing in my opinion.

as a reader of online and magazine material I make a citizens demand that macna release some cycling videos that specifically use seneye, exclude non seneye data, and update us on the compliance timeframes across live rock transfer skip cycles (how all macna reefs begin on time) and dry start cycles (how most forum posts originate) and one set for KP aquatics curing cycles, let's see how high that nh3 actually gets when stewing in totes.

I'm not as interested in a retailer giving me that talk as I would be someone accepted by MACNA as wielding a scientific method well enough to be associated with their namesake..macna, we demand new cycling vids to match the fact we can all test evenly now.
 
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brandon429

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This thread here needs to be for crash examples as we move forward, those videos are more for positive outcome cycling/ opposite of what we collect here now that your system is ready for use.



it’s amazing to note that after asking three different forums for crash examples at the start of cycling, we have none. That fact certainly upends the old rules about cycling risks, and it highlights the fast inherent control adding water to a tank of rocks affords. The point of our thread is that gaining ammonia control is easy, not hard, and not something we have to carefully coax into place or risk stalling by changing some variable like adding too much or too little ammonia etc


the link in post #28 directly shows why the public thinks cycles are stalled when they’re actually ready to carry bioload at safe levels. It’s in the test kits, the big discrepancy, the reefs are actually following fairly close and reliable timelines.
 
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brandon429

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Team


after battling more skeptics today was curious, has anyone found that elusive 1 failed cycle example yet


*there are a few tightly, tightly controlled chemistry experiment posts and private conversations I've seen where indeed isolated bottle bac didn't oxidize ammonia/maybe the bacteria was dead etc. in any form of production like bottle bac making, storing, selling, some units will be bad we know this basic QA percentage as loss/shrinkage

but the context changes 1000% when you insert the requirement: in a display reef tank.


Displays are never tightly controlled chemistry experiments in capped off micro bottles of sterilized glass, sterilized media etc. They're fifty vectors per minute bacterial swamps...with surface area amplification

my theory on why 100% of cycles done in a display worked out fine (and why no seneye posts exist to show otherwise, not a single one) has to do with this surface area. When we create displays, even haphazardly, the rocks and sand positioned in the middle of the display like we're trained to do amplify for presentation to wastewater tiny amounts of bacteria that got in which we didn't account for. This is hard to replicate and upscale in a test tube, those are low surface area scum studies.

even a tiny bit of active oxidizer bacteria spread out on surface area, *then diluted like a display does* (test tubes are low low dilution factor) line up to make every cycling example you can possibly search a success.


even the fish folks add are *covered* in cycling bacteria on slime coats, these instantly are shared with the display they're put into for division. also factor in the rarity of complete, total bottle bac kills (some cells remain viable, they're water bac packed in water after all) and you can see how these cycles turn out fine.

There are also myriad cycling bac in your tap water, in your make water, any water that isn't boiled. so many input sources for the bacteria we were told were finicky, subject to stall and nonperformance.

if that theory is wrong, I expect some proof links of dead tanks then we'll shoot down the theory.

anyone who owns a seneye + a quarantine tank can see what I'm meaning about surface area amplification / lack thereof...qt's are not displays, so they show a limited ability to handle oxidation compared to displays, which never ever do.
 
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