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A snail was deadProbably something died in there while you were out even snails. They can cause a major cyano bloom.
Can I take one of the three pieces of rock out. This tank was given to me. I’m not sure why it was setup as it waswe have a thread where about five hundred reefs simply clean it all out, all at once, and do not wait for any sort of hesitation. that's an option here. with new water, your params will match what the bag of salt was and the reef will look like before you left.
How do I clean the sandits very easy to fix the system this way
catch fish and hold them separate
drain out the water, catch it for rinse use.
take each live rock and swish it around in the drawn off reef water, twisting hard and using cloth or something to rub off all the hangers on that grew in place. clean it in saltwater then throw out the sw, and rinse the rocks one more time in new saltwater now they're clean.
take the rest of the tank which is a couple inches of water and sand, and clean out the sand by rinsing it in tap water for an hour until its 10000% clean sand. right now its cloudy, totally.
when cleaned, do sand's final rinse in RO water, to evacuate the tap.
reinstall the clean sand, add all new reef water. its not cloudy at all bc u rinsed for a long, long time in tap. pristinely clean.
set in your cloudless cleaned rocks in the cloudless clean tank.
put fish back in/corals, snails etc. match the temp and salinity of this water to the old.
done
none of that causes a cycle. taking shortcuts to the above, to lessen work, causes cycles and mistakes that above is already well known nano reef cleaning approach. well used. well documented.
there's only one mistake I can fathom in this process: not rinsing sand until cloudless, and specifically putting back in cloudy rocks or sand, though its outstanding we should not do that
Do I put the sand into a bucket first? Do I rinse the sand in the tank with tap water. That makes me nervous?
There is a bunch of worms in the sandYou are going to pull everything out of that tank so you can rinse the sand in there if you feel like carrying it to the hose outside or to the bathtub. I didn't feel like moving my tank so I siphoned all the sand out into a bucket and then rinsed.