GHA Has Destroyed My Passion for the Hobby

[brandon429]

they can still get it, I've seen them get it/just not as bad as diaper bedders

I think bare bottom is ugly and lacking, so for my pico I'll be rip cleaning to the end of its life. I don't have a better way lol

any reef tank, any setting, will develop GHA if we simply shine a high pressure sodium plant grow light on it, down real close to the water.

its why I think lots of GHA tanks are blamed on nine reasons other than we're shining too much dang light on them.


Team, look at Maritza's vase here. Its got more dang shadows than it does blasting light.

see how her sps is perfect, no recession. no gha for ten years?? this business of chasing the highest PAR we can attain is keeping my rip clean threads going bigtime. Maritza knows you don't have to blast light into a reef:





look how muted and shaded her zone is vs this all bright light nanos and full sized tanks. gha farms.

any common reefer would be running twice that light power, so you could see into the tank better. that's what algae likes, it isn't in the nitrate and phosphate levels, we don't even factor those in any rip clean thread.


you want to tell her: turn up that light!

but it wouldn't make the corals be any better than that. fitting three thousand dollars of top shelf sps for ten years into a fishbowl is very telling about best practices to reduce GHA>

**she does her vase without rip cleans* and I don't know how. likely the lighting, that's some Bob Ross stuff right there. to get to year ten I had to take my bowl apart and clean it ten times.

 

[Thales]

--

 

[brandon429]

@Spare time

I honestly would like to know if you're telling your LFS customers this info when you refer them to fluconazole

Do you tell them it can kill their reef in any way, or just the positive parts?

Rip cleaning has never killed anyone's tank, and it's free of cost/ not sold, how do you vet the information you give to customers?

I know you'll never recommend a rip clean, it's in your post history to not recommend it

Isn't that what gives lfs a bad name though, recommending the dangerous for sale items vs the known safe methods that are free?

 

[pandaparties]

@Spare time

I honestly would like to know if you're telling your LFS customers this info when you refer them to fluconazole

Do you tell them it can kill their reef in any way, or just the positive parts?

Rip cleaning has never killed anyone's tank, and it's free of cost/ not sold, how do you vet the information you give to customers?

Really depends on the size of the tank, rip cleaning monster tanks just isn't an option a lot of the time. I've got 500lbs of rock lol. Purple spined urchins and scrubbers are great and keep things under control, but I've also had good results with fluc without getting cyano/dinos after. Obviously there are always chances of negative side effects when using medication on our tank but sometimes there's not a great alternative!

 

[brandon429]

Agreed fully

Don't put sand in large reefs to avoid the issue altogether

I never see any peeling of the onion for details such as tank size, accessibility, status of the sandbed in cross section pics etc. We could weed out a huge portion of jobs in need safely by taking time to identify which ones are ripe for rip cleaning and which ones aren't. It's the blanket recommends I'm seeing as a problem and that's across the board in reefing not just from Spare Time.

Look at Eric Cohen's posts here on red slime remover, he's the inventor. Pages long blanket recommends, no work threads, no customization for the recommends at all on cyano posts, that gives me concern just like when bottle bac sellers tell us reef cycles can stall and that no filter bacteria are in tank water.

It's amazing to me that something with this degree of logged outcome is still such a back alley procedure

If we mainstream rip cleans until a better option is found and studied in work threads, we'll save thousands of nano reefs from elective takedown and sometimes actual crashes due to compounding issues.


It's like the gatekeepers just don't advocate what isn't on the shelf for sale

 

[Garf]

they can still get it, I've seen them get it/just not as bad as diaper bedders

I think bare bottom is ugly and lacking, so for my pico I'll be rip cleaning to the end of its life. I don't have a better way lol

any reef tank, any setting, will develop GHA if we simply shine a high pressure sodium plant grow light on it, down real close to the water.

its why I think lots of GHA tanks are blamed on nine reasons other than we're shining too much dang light on them.


Team, look at Maritza's vase here. Its got more dang shadows than it does blasting light.

see how her sps is perfect, no recession. no gha for ten years?? this business of chasing the highest PAR we can attain is keeping my rip clean threads going bigtime. Maritza knows you don't have to blast light into a reef:





look how muted and shaded her zone is vs this all bright light nanos and full sized tanks. gha farms.

any common reefer would be running twice that light power, so you could see into the tank better. that's what algae likes, it isn't in the nitrate and phosphate levels, we don't even factor those in any rip clean thread.


you want to tell her: turn up that light!

but it wouldn't make the corals be any better than that. fitting three thousand dollars of top shelf sps for ten years into a fishbowl is very telling about best practices to reduce GHA>

**she does her vase without rip cleans* and I don't know how. likely the lighting, that's some Bob Ross stuff right there. to get to year ten I had to take my bowl apart and clean it ten times.

Can't see any sand or CCA or film on the glass, especially on impossible places to reach in that little vase, and she doesn't clean it?, lol

 

[Tamberav]

they can still get it, I've seen them get it/just not as bad as diaper bedders

I think bare bottom is ugly and lacking, so for my pico I'll be rip cleaning to the end of its life. I don't have a better way lol

any reef tank, any setting, will develop GHA if we simply shine a high pressure sodium plant grow light on it, down real close to the water.

its why I think lots of GHA tanks are blamed on nine reasons other than we're shining too much dang light on them.


Team, look at Maritza's vase here. Its got more dang shadows than it does blasting light.

see how her sps is perfect, no recession. no gha for ten years?? this business of chasing the highest PAR we can attain is keeping my rip clean threads going bigtime. Maritza knows you don't have to blast light into a reef:





look how muted and shaded her zone is vs this all bright light nanos and full sized tanks. gha farms.

any common reefer would be running twice that light power, so you could see into the tank better. that's what algae likes, it isn't in the nitrate and phosphate levels, we don't even factor those in any rip clean thread.


you want to tell her: turn up that light!

but it wouldn't make the corals be any better than that. fitting three thousand dollars of top shelf sps for ten years into a fishbowl is very telling about best practices to reduce GHA>

**she does her vase without rip cleans* and I don't know how. likely the lighting, that's some Bob Ross stuff right there. to get to year ten I had to take my bowl apart and clean it ten times.

Light is just one factor, there are plenty of high light tanks that are not algae farms. There are even high light tanks that have high nutrients and are not algae farms. They are coral farms.

I am talking about regular sized tanks and not vases though.

 

[Troylee]

My tank just exploded with it for the first time in my reefing experience! I’ve never had to deal with it myself until now.. guess that’s what I get for buying an old fo. System lol… so far some turbos and a sea hare are doing a good job but I gotta keep moving the snails to the rocks with it on them.. not touching the sea hare cause I’m afraid it will ink! Haha! He’s free to eat where ever he or she goes!

 

[brandon429]

Rich don't get mad at me for pushing the rip clean in this thread. I do it because we have complete control over nanos this way, it's not to step on the toes of big tankers. I'm recommending the best fix to the keeper vs trying to just get entrants for my method... the recommend is out of care for his enjoyment in the hobby not just to poof up my rip clean threads.

if he does all the steps we show, he gets the outcome we show I'm certain. I know you might/likely have disagreements with my take on your talk, or the method I'm recommending in general/it's ok to post disagreements with my statements

when it comes to nano reefs, there's benefit in working with someone who has hyperfocused on nano reefs for 20 years is all I'm saying. I realize the tangent I took against LFS/fluconazole might be disagreeable, anything you want to write I'd read.

The reason I don't want any other method used for the OP is because they invite variation and loss, sometimes, and with this niche method his tank will not die or have any risk whatsoever. if there's one thing I'd like to be able to blab about it would be making an invaded nano reef become a not invaded nano reef by noon tomorrow, I feel we've logged the right to claim that with diligent work.

I know we had some disagreements lately I won't jump all over your post even if you disagree on mine. I would be curious to know what you were going to say. your talk was very very very good.

lemme work this nano Humu is my request because I love working those nanos in good faith, its that simple.

 

[wolt]

Spare time

When recommending fluconazole, a retail product for sale, don't withhold a link to the 500 page fluconazole thread so that readers can see 75% cyano invasions for years after using it

The fluconazole thread is a massive incidence of GHA killing, then getting dinos, then cyano in the majority cyclically

It's great at killing gha, then it's great at causing a new invasion. We need the waste mass cleared out first in nano reefs


We may elect to use it as growback prevention in worst case scenarios - After the rip clean, not before

I agree I got dinos after using it on my last tank

 

[brandon429]

and I don't want to oversell rip cleans as cures, they don't fix everyone's tank in one pass, we sometimes get recurring cyano and recurring GHA we can't beat


but not very often


the main reason I'm blanket recommending a rip clean to any nano owner even if they don't post pics allowing me to peel the onion is because having a reef display of high volume water turnover, shearing across clean and high surface area coralline-lined live rocks with no invasions blanketing the surfaces reducing the area, with a high degree of suspended quality feed proteins pelagically circulating in the water column and having absolutely no pent up waste anywhere in the tank is good for all nano reefs, as a blanket recommend.

I never ask for invasion ID in a rip clean thread, we don't care what genus makes the tank look ugly. to ID is to hesitate in nano reefing.

I don't ask for params in reef tank troubleshoots, someone will just relay to me a guesstimate of their N and P levels off a non digital test kit and expect me to believe those are accurate. too many variables in parameter chasing...to factor parameters is to hesitate in nano reefing.

Rip cleaning extends the life of any nano reef, says the owner of one heck of an old nano reef vase.


the only thing we exclude during the rip clean is the waste + invader cells, that can't hurt anyone's nano/ so my recommend is never harmful.

after a correctly ran rip clean, any nano with a recurring invasion we legit could not beat is now better positioned to use the legit means since the invader mass was just reduced 99.9%

if the keeper succeeds in killing the recurring invasion through some water doser, those few cells land in a clean bed vs a bed that hasn't been touched in ages. I'm picking on LFS employees and product salesmen for doing blanket recommends but am guilty of doing them myself, that's irony am aware. we have the work threads that keep allowing for it, using other people's reefs vs my own reef.

 

[TokenReefer]

I have a beef with that heh


Because it's not a link to him fixing algae in twenty reef tanks not his own.

Yeah but surely ripping something down to remove all the algae and keeping an algae free system are different things; shouldn't be compare imo. One will absolutely render a tank algae free, the other is how one keeps a tank that way

 

[brandon429]

show us fifty pages of results you did using other means in other people’s tanks though

if results are what matter, I’m not sure the methods deserve lots of critique. It’s an inefficient process for large tanks / given / and it’s the best process for nanos due to repeatability.

one day another method will replace rip cleans and still get pages of results, no crashes, and no tradeoff invasions using stuff we don’t have to buy from a pet store. Seriously I’ve been awaiting that method for eight years now

 

[vetteguy53081]

Title says it all. I've been in the fish game on and off for about 30 years now. I don't think my morale has ever been this low. I feel like my tanks are just becoming a source of stress in my life. My 20g reef (below) has been up since 2019, my FOWLR has been up since 2015, and I also setup a 20g long frag tank because for a while my montipora and war coral were growing so well I was actually propagating both of them. The Monti still is, but the war coral is not. It's just a continuous cycle of whack-a-mole with which tank has the most runaway GHA problem and then I spend 3 hours+ scurbbing it while I use my old Eheim as a shop-vac. Then it looks nice for a week, rinse, repeat.

I've tried:
PhosphateRX - next morning my previously healthy Yellow Tang was dead.
Vibrant - seemed to make no difference at all
I bought internal refugiums and chaeto - GHA smothered and killed it.

At this point, I think I'm just going to let it run wild, keep the fish healthy, but when they pass away, not replace them and work toward taking the tanks down.

Keep it simple. Why would we take a situation like this and rip clean a tank and add chemicals that may or may no work. Its GHA, not a tank full of fireworms or gorilla crabs.
Pull off as much as you can by hand in a container of tank water and scrub the rest with a firm toothbrush and some 3% hydrogen peroxide. If the monti is well attached, skip the scrubbing and container and Reduce white light intensity and number of hours of white lighting and add some snails such as :
Astrea
cerith
turbo grazer
trochus

A Pencil urchin or two

8-10 Caribbean blue leg hermits

Are you using RODI water or tap water from the faucet ?
What is your phosphate level?
Is tank at or near a window?

 

[MartinM]

Fluconazole is such an easy fix. Why are you so frustrated?

Now, if you’re trying to starve it, I can see why you’d be frustrated, because that’s not possible. Everything else in your tank would starve long before.

 

[Roatan Reef]

What kind of CUC? I am struggling with dead algae after a fluconazole treatment

I never treated with chemicals,,but I had a stretch of bad GHA..put in new heater dialed in to °78.00 .

Did 20% water change and toothbrush scrubbed rocks and coral, used fine micron net to remove loose algae particles, and Tank is doing great now...heck, I'm even waiting 2 weeks for water change now, because Tank is doing so good!

 

[brandon429]

when we do an oil change we do the filter too or just leave it? Way to be thorough. I bet your sports car doesn’t get any corners cut, we are just like that in rip clean threads.


@vetteguy53081 the reason we would rip clean it as stated is because there’s a link most people read to see the long term outcomes and those were good long term outcomes

nothing hinted as bad in a rip clean was found in the link work

you’re having him leave a sandbed full of waste plus take on the waste of copious waste pellets from guessing at invaders in addition which is terrible for growback and future tradeoff invasions


if you track your recommend out for other people’s tanks, over a year and you log those efforts, you see them getting tradeoff invasions since you told them to leave all the waste in the small nano and just add more to it. We rip clean because it’s time to evacuate his setup for the very first time.

your recommend vectors fish disease into his tank, mine doesn’t. Yours breaks biosecurity to add those wasteful animals as a guess. Tell him to fallow prep the clean up crew at least, don’t wreck people’s tanks with velvet if at all possible? Not doing work and follow up in dedicated threads gives this pass to make guessing recommends / not on the hook for outcomes with passby recommends.



(a separate fifty page rip clean thread)
that’s two rip clean threads here now, and not one alternate work thread showing work in others tanks.

I’m amazed when best means and practices stated don’t come with any work proof.

Official Sand Rinse and Tank Transfer thread

If you are reading this thread to cure a tank invasion from a link I sent you, we do not need to identify your type of invasion here we do not need you to test anything at anytime regarding nitrate, phosphate etc Above all, we do not need to see a microscope slide picture of your invasion at...

www.reef2reef.com

as much as folks from the crowd hate rip cleans, for some invented reason, they can’t rectify that dislike against the scores of tanks we save with them. Since no alternate work threads are posted by detractors, I can’t understand why they’d redirect without any shown work in the matter.

everyone knows a topical application of peroxide kills the gha, we are planning to fix what feeds that gha as well.

 

[HumuhumuFan]

You sure your heater is working? Never seen algae on a heater before.

I have 2 heaters in the tank, one set at 72 in case the other fails. I should probably rotate which one is active more often.

I don't see any snails.

There's a large Trochus in there, 2 or 3 Astreas, and an unknown number of Nassarius. Last week I moved a Zebra Turbo in there from another tank, as well.

 

[brandon429]

Don’t add more cuc

you can see they rarely work.

 

[brandon429]

They might start working after the rip clean ironically

one thing notable in peroxide searches was that peroxide + gha must smell like a bbq to fish and clean up crews, they begin work on plants they prior avoided.

if lucky, the growback cells for gha will be palatable now, it’s a lucky hope for the existing cuc

and if not, you’d lift just the rocks out like Vette said for detailing, but it will be after this initial rip clean to get all that sand clean. If you stuck a stick in that tank and swooshed up the bed it would be dangerous, you’ll see the gray water when you rinse it. That much waste is stratified and mid-decay in your reef

please take pics of your rinse water and assembly steps pls if possible so we have a succession others can pattern after



never cleaning the sand is exactly like brushing teeth only, and never going to the dentist for the full rasping flush catch-up. It’s beyond short changing to hint to reefers that taking a nano reef for dentistry runs is bad when we have sixty pages of results on file now showing how happy the aquarists are once it’s completed.


when it’s time to change vehicle oil we do the filter and the oil, both, sports cars get the best care and treating your nano like a sports car will instantly make it look like one and run like one


I give you my word it’ll work like you want, if you rinse it like a champion best of the best first round vs a hesitant initial go

hammer the sand into total compliance, then do all manner of growback work hopeful changes. That order of ops wins, don’t use growback controls as the removal mechanism, this rule alone means your nano reef is never invaded again.

the very thing that Tired is making fun of is the fundamental control you have at all times that saves your reef from a loss, rip cleans allow you to work the tank without recycling it.


non critics will see that rip clean threads are backflushing of entire aquariums exactly like the filters that run large zoo exhibits, surface area restoration benefit outweighs the benthic communities affected by the rip clean, they grow back fast.


when we rip clean a nano reef, it’s overall chemistry and efficiency increases, it’s the rule of filter export in aquarium science. We didn’t get those after pics and smiling owners by photoshop, thats earned outcome on file not to be discounted until we also see some alternate earned results.

the communal organisms we remove as about to be stated by critics are simply regrowing. Page one of the readable fifty page rip clean thread above specifically shows pod regeneration after a rip clean in a week. Im saying there are no downsides to getting the results we show.

there are pictures of benthic community reestablishment within a week in our rip clean study…this is also why our after pics are good, not bad. It means the claim that we overstrip rocks is null. What’s on file is oligotrophic happy reef tanks for years.


cleaning rocks only, on top of dirty sand, invariably casts up a waste cloud, taking the rocks in and out of that nano… That’s redistributing waste and invader cells, it’s so backwards to the underlying current offered here.


honest forethought is given to restoring your specific nano based on the opening pic.