I caused a big precipitation event….

[WhatCouldGoWrong71]

In my sump only thank goodness. Completely my fault. Wasn’t sure where to post this, was thinking here.

So, no need to beat me up any more that I have done to myself. But, I caused this event upstream from my Refugium. Fortunately, the Fuge prevented it from getting up to the tank, or the majority of it. The water enters the top and exits the bottom in my Fuge, I had about 4 inches of ceramic biomedia there and it acted like a dam, literally clogged itself shut for the most part, my Chaeto was like “frozen”, kinda wild. I’m not sure what to do with the ceramic media. My pods, stars and worms (by default they are there too) that call the media home are still alive and doing well. I pulled all the ceramic media out and have it in a bucket with a heater and a wave maker. All the media is covered on a slimey goo. Anyway to salvage these, specifically am only worried about salvaging these if I can retain the biodiversity that is on them. I’m am thinking it’s a complete reboot, but I am unsure. Thoughts?

 

[Enchanted Reefs]

Have any pictures?

 

[WhatCouldGoWrong71]

I don’t. Man that was a headache to clean.

 

[Randy Holmes-Farley]

What happened to cause this event? I’m a bit confused by the slimey description since calcium carbonate would not typically be slimey.

 

[WhatCouldGoWrong71]

The slime is a layer on top of the calcium carbonate. This tank is a high demand (for me) system. I have been managing PH (and sharing the story) in the 8.5-8.55 range. I’m dosing between 450-500 MLS of each alk and cal a day plus 6 liters of kalk. It’s a reefer 250 that is all sps and 70 pounds of KP gulf rock that has heavy coralline on all the rock. I have about 50 frags in the tank. I can easily see growth on about 75% of the frags, it’s kinda crazy to see how fast some have encrusted a frag and are already starting to encrust on the rock. Tank had water put in it 7/4.

I run two return pumps (Varios S2) and I’m the return chamber I had all my dosing lines. Please note I run sodium hydroxide < 8.50 PH and my system flips to sodium BiCarb >8.49. After 2 weeks of introducing kalk to my system, with the dosing lines in the return chamber, the S2 pumps were locking up. I was dosing on top of a wave maker but that was inches from the first of the 2 S2s. I was having a pump fail about every 3-4 days after that. At the same time that my pumps started being challenged with this dosing, I doubled my sps count in the tank and my consumption started to go up. I’ve been using my trident to assist with my dosing ( looking at either 1 Dkh or 100 ppm of cal and +\- 50%). The DOS doesn’t care if it sends cal and alk at the same time either. So (insert more human error here) I took 3 of the dosing lines, I thought I grabbed both alk lines and the kalk line and I put them in the chamber where my roller and skimmer are. Thinking that was a larger mixing chamber. I took a much larger wave maker, and dosed directly into that. So, 4 days later and both pumps were still online. So, at this moment I was feeling like “not all hero’s wear capes”… then over the course of 10 days I hit days where I had dosed near 800 mills of alk and 600 of cal, still seeing growth and nothing funky in the tank. I posted my experience and was told to check around my rocks for hardness. I did have some, but very minor. So part of my daily husbandry had been to poke around the rocks. This was my “scientific” way of checking for precip. So I wound up ordering a GEO silent CARX for this set up as, unlike my other, much larger, display I am failing miserably at stability with this tank. Swings are becoming the norm. So all that is to lead up to this:

Sunday my pumps failed again, as did 2 of my wave makers. When I went in to my sump to address it, I noticed that everything was caked in my sump. I had grabbed the calcium line instead of the BiCarb line. So I was dosing sodium hydroxide, calcium and kalk (12 hours a day) all in the same chamber which is directly before my Chaeto and biomedia and a foam filter. When I took the foam filter out, it weighed what felt like a pound. It backed up the flow which then let the high concentrate liquify most of my Chaeto, and encrusting about 20% of it. The slime was from turning Chaeto into a gel like substance. The ceramic media completely clogged up further causing the constant dosing to pool up. Just enough was making it through to not cause a flood. The calcium also locked my alarm float in the open spot so it would not have sounded the alarm, my secondary alarms are in the return chamber. So that’s my story and I am sticking to it.

I noticed some white marks on my glass last night and went in with a plastic razor and cleaned the enter display. There was a very fine layer on all the glass. I think I just missed mucking up my display. Yesterday, with a clean sump and no Chaeto and no ceramic media but I do have the foam filter for bible management, my dosing is backing line as I dosed 390MILs of all and 450 mills of cal.

But my PH is still holding strong lol.

 

[Randy Holmes-Farley]

OK, thanks for the info.

I do not think you can clean calcium carbonate off of media and retain bacteria, but the goo can likely be rinsed off with water. Use an acid of some sort to remove calcium carbonate.

 

[WhatCouldGoWrong71]

Interestingly, my roller fleece consumption has been steadily increasing over the last couple weeks. It’s 3x my other system, and there is absolutely no reason for that. Now that I have “cleaned” my system, I’ve used 1/2 a roll in 2 days.