Starting over the right way!

Nov 11, 2019

Rick Mathew

Valuable Member

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Nooooooooob1 said:
Hello everyone!
I haven't been here on R2R in a long time, but I'm hoping to be more active.

My 40 gallon reef has been a mess. I had to go on a five month work trip back in March and since then, I've sort of let my tank go. Partly because a couple fish died and my cleaner shrimp got sucked into a powerhead and I guess all that got me feeling depressed about it. The other reason was because I made the mistake of buying live rock with pests(thought it couldn't happen to me) from the LFS instead of starting out with just dry rock and curing it myself. So many pests and aiptasia have spread around my system. I know bristle worms are considered good, but there are so many of them all over the place in the sand.

Since all I have left are 2 clowns, a chromis, and a goby and a couple corals, I decided I'm going to restart my system! Then I noticed that Petco is doing 50% off their bigger tanks so I ended up with a new 75 gallon DT and 29G sump! I built a stand an am making water for it now to start cycling. I will slowly start removing the equipment from the old tank, cleaning it, and adding it to the new tank. As you can see, the stand is still in progress. I want to add doors of some type and paint it, but that will probably come after the full transition is made.

One thing I want to ask is what are everyone's thoughts on reusing live sand and rock? The rock I know I can bleach and let roast in the sun etc etc to kill everything, but the sand I'm not sure about. Is it possible to get all the old gunk/phosphorus out? If not, I'll just buy the 40lb bags of dead dry sand.

Thanks!