Neglected Aquarium

[ItsAName]

Hi everyone, thank you so much for the condolences, it means a lot. I'm always moved by how nice and helpful everyone is on this forum.

@brandon429 thank you so much for the advice and taking the time to look over my situation. To be honest, I'm a little nervous about doing that big of a cleanup at once and don't have the necessary resources (and energy) to do everything at once. You're probably right with the approach but I'm going to have to try and stretch it out over a couple of days. I'll start on Thursday and finish on Saturday. After which, it sounded like it was a good idea to start fluc after the clean up. The one step I'm not sure I can do is rinsing the sand. It would be so arduous. I'm thinking I'll physically pull out whatever sand is a mess and siphon clean it for now. I'll post progress pics.

 

[Fishfishfishfish]

[QUOTE="... On top of that I left the chaeto in the sump. Nitrates shot up to over 160ppm. I lost two corals. Might end up loosing two more. Hopefully they will recover...[/QUOTE]

Do you mean the chaeto being in the sump was bad because it died with no light? Like the dead chaeto caused problems? Sorry if that is an obvious question, I am currently going over my ghetto refugium with a fine toothed comb because I am not yet 100% confident my plan will work. Trying to learn every possible thing that could go wrong before it does. Thanks!

 

[brandon429]

It's big job agreed. Since you are having to customize the job around practicality/time and resources then these brainstorms might be tank savers:

-nothing you do will affect bacteria. If it takes four days, the bacteria aren't the risk... Losing them isn't a factor here. Bacteria only need to be wet, they don't need feed or perfect temps and salinity here, so that frees up concerns to be allocated. Detritus, half rotten proteins that expose ammonia and metabolites to sensitive animals, is every bit of the concern.

-however you divide up the cleaning, keep sensitives away from clouding. Be creative, even your rocks have shakeable detritus in them. Moving em to hosting buckets is relocating cloud... until worked they'll cast off detritus and leave clear trails of it wherever they get moved to (which is why actual cleaning is required)
The space they were formally sitting in, in the tank, will cloud when they're lifted out. If for some reason you take a few days to work while corals are unlit, in heated buckets etc, then day one back in the cleaned tank isn't full production mode. It's slow ramp up, don't burn me with bright lights and perfect params and zero algae all the sudden mode. First several days in new tank are overcast reef week/slo ramp back and easy on whites, those bleach. Blue doesn't bleach, helps in transition.

-the sand rinse thread has examples galore of tank take downs, I'm sure a few were time-adjusted as well. You might catch unspoken details, planning details, in the bulk examples that save your tank. Check out any one of the before pictures, imagine what their tank would do predictively before we cleaned (or replaced) their whole sandbed at once-then check outcome. Develop predictability to some degree in your tank, wing it as little as possible by reading others trials and outcomes.

-why feel pressed to reuse sand immediately? You could just toss it, rinse no old sand. Go bare bottom till chart growback/compliance of the rocks. You could easily add rinsed new sand later. Delayed sand is an option


- taking a few days to hold items, kept separate but heated and circulated, isn't bad. It's holding detritus for extended days, make day 1 highest effort run focused on the rocks. They're your dependable filtration base, and to remove algae and chemically kill it at the same time restores porosity, restores pass through and around, and boosts filtration. Give rocks primo effort up front, the rest can wait. Why not toss that old bed?


Full water changes, if this reef isn't huge, is ideal it's not harmful. The temptation is to reuse waste water, or not evacuate detritus, if we can trust that bacteria are bulletproof and the mud is the danger, you can customize your take down cleaning as needed. Here's the work for pattern hunting coming up


The help in the following thread isn't my opinions it's the logged outcomes. I didn't get a ton of long term follow up, people reef their own ways in time. But we did get updates long enough to tell if things died or not, it's the #1 thing people want to report. We used a common order of operations in every case, and we used the before pics in every case to isolate sensitives away from detritus.

https://www.reef2reef.com/threads/the-official-sand-rinse-thread-aka-one-against-many.230281/page-12

The outstanding irony in that thread is the deeper cleans are safest, and the partial cleans are the riskiest. A few days time won't matter, how thorough you are in the end matters.
There's either clouding in the new tank or there's not, simple as that.

All details about sandbed cleaning with examples are found in this thread above

B

 

[Jonathan Troutt]

[QUOTE="... On top of that I left the chaeto in the sump. Nitrates shot up to over 160ppm. I lost two corals. Might end up loosing two more. Hopefully they will recover...

Do you mean the chaeto being in the sump was bad because it died with no light? Like the dead chaeto caused problems? Sorry if that is an obvious question, I am currently going over my ghetto refugium with a fine toothed comb because I am not yet 100% confident my plan will work. Trying to learn every possible thing that could go wrong before it does. Thanks![/QUOTE]

Yes I left the chaeto in the sump without a light for over a month it slowly disentegrated to nothing and as it did that my nitrates show through the roof.

 

[ItsAName]

-why feel pressed to reuse sand immediately? You could just toss it, rinse no old sand. Go bare bottom till chart growback/compliance of the rocks. You could easily add rinsed new sand later. Delayed sand is an option

I didn't even know this was an option. I thought taking out the sand would be devastating? I thought the sand contains bunch of good bacteria. Also, I thought if I disturb it too much it could release some bad stuff in the water. If taking out all the sand is a option, I'll probably do it as it seems the biggest part of the clean up. What does everyone think? Also, my sand is infested with bristle worms, but in a good way (I think), probably 100 or so.

Here are some progress pictures. I've been doing about 2 hours of work a day on it for the last 4 days. I feel like I accomplished part 1 of the process. I did a 50% water change (that's all the buckets I had), clean all the filters, clean the sand alot (but there's still lots of algae in it), cleaned the refugium, cleaned as much of the rocks and coral by hand, cleaned the glass, replaced the gfo, replaced the carbon, replaced the soda lime for ph maintenance, cleaned the protein skimmer, etc...

Next phase over the next couple of days is taking out some of the rock structures (mainly the middle since it's in the worse shape) and clean in detail with a brush and peroxide, and probably do the same for the branch structure on the left. Also need to glue some corals that fell. Not to go off topic, but I found almost everything I glued down with ME Coral Glue has broken loose! But everything with Bulk Reef Supply glue has stayed sturdy. I'll probably do another 50% water change and clean the sand in the process. Goal is to finish all this by Thursday. And yes, that's my son in the reflection, not a ghost!

Another question. My snails are covered in algae. If I scrape them with a razor, will they feel it? Is there a better way to help them out?

 

[vetteguy53081]

I didn't even know this was an option. I thought taking out the sand would be devastating? I thought the sand contains bunch of good bacteria. Also, I thought if I disturb it too much it could release some bad stuff in the water. If taking out all the sand is a option, I'll probably do it as it seems the biggest part of the clean up. What does everyone think? Also, my sand is infested with bristle worms, but in a good way (I think), probably 100 or so.

Here are some progress pictures. I've been doing about 2 hours of work a day on it for the last 4 days. I feel like I accomplished part 1 of the process. I did a 50% water change (that's all the buckets I had), clean all the filters, clean the sand alot (but there's still lots of algae in it), cleaned the refugium, cleaned as much of the rocks and coral by hand, cleaned the glass, replaced the gfo, replaced the carbon, replaced the soda lime for ph maintenance, cleaned the protein skimmer, etc...

Next phase over the next couple of days is taking out some of the rock structures (mainly the middle since it's in the worse shape) and clean in detail with a brush and peroxide, and probably do the same for the branch structure on the left. Also need to glue some corals that fell. Not to go off topic, but I found almost everything I glued down with ME Coral Glue has broken loose! But everything with Bulk Reef Supply glue has stayed sturdy. I'll probably do another 50% water change and clean the sand in the process. Goal is to finish all this by Thursday. And yes, that's my son in the reflection, not a ghost!

Another question. My snails are covered in algae. If I scrape them with a razor, will they feel it? Is there a better way to help them out?

Clean snails with a soft toothbrush. I see you use a Tunze strong magnet- Good choice. Consider either a yellow eye kole tang OR a foxface rabbit who will help mow down that algae. I have had great success with phosphate RX as well as Red Sea Po4X to reduce algae.