Tank REBUILD after the crash(es) and a fl

[chris75]

So on Mothers Day of this year my wife and I decide to do a big water change and clean the tank up some. I have a 75 gallon tank and was working towards adding corals and anemones since the tank had been going steadily for over two years without so much as a hiccup. We have an Aquatop canister filter that does really well and made for a 150 gallon tank and even has a UV light built in. My wife took the filter out to change the pads and clean the canister and by accident, she put the bioballs in regular tap water instead of the canister water. I had also cleaned some algae off of the rocks and scraped the walls. All that combined threw my tank into a re-cycle. I lost a two year old hippo Tang, a two year old Yellow Tang, a clown, a banded sleeper goby, two cleaner wrasses and a Dwarf Flame Angel. I was completely devistated as I am disabled and this is really the only hobby that I can do and truly enjoy. I called it the great Mothers Day massacre of 2017!

Flash forward to July 4th. After the re-cycle, I had managed to replace all the fish except now I had two ocellaris clowns with beautiful black tips, a HUGE Yellow Tang, a baby Hippo Tang and another goby. We cleaned the filter again but the nitrates had been high for the past few days and the tank developed that red algae so I decided to look and see if a peppermint shrimp had died or maybe a crab and I just couldn't see it so I moved all the rocks out and cleaned the red algae off the rocks and sifted the dirt but no dead bodies. My tank cycles again causing everyone to die except for my clowns who I threw in my nano tank that I just started building. When talking to my local fish room we learned that since my sand is WAY OVER five years old it's the problem of keeping my nitrates high so.....

Thanks for being bored to death, I am rebuilding my tank from top to bottom starting tomorrow! I have all of the supplies with new LED lights and everything. I will let you tag along as I re-do the entire tank. I'm sorry for the long thread but I had to build up the reason why we are doing this. So I hope you enjoy the tag along as much as we will actually be building it.

 

[amazongb]

Sorry to hear about your losses.. I"ll tag along.. keep moving forward!

 

[Flippers4pups]

Sorry for your losses. Something isn't right to loose fish due to cleaning a canister filter.

Can you please give us some feed back ground to help you.

Questions:

Water is your source water? Tap, RO/DI?

What's your water pramaters?

 

[chris75]

I generally use RO/DI water but when the tank isn't full I'll mix it with tap water. When cleaning the canister, my wife cleaned the bio-balls with regular tap water instead of putting them into the water that came out of the canister itself. After this crash, there just wasn't enough "good bacteria" in the tank when we did another clean up. The tank had that red algae all over the rocks so we pulled them and cleaned them and scrapped the sides of the glass and later that night, the water got foggy and the nitrates sky rocketed.

 

[chris75]

 

[chris75]

The first photo above is the tank being drained and the old sand still in. The next is of my Current-USA Orbit IC Loop lights that can be operated together with up to three fans all with one controller that I have mounted on the front of my stand. I bought light mounts to go on my tank but they wont fit over the small lip around the rim so now I have to send them back because I don't want to cut the lip and compromise the integrity of the tank. The last two pictures are of two HUGE new live rock that I bought to put into the tank to help it add some bacteria and maybe cycle faster. I also added some conditioner that is suppose to ready my tank immediately but I'm not stupid enough to add fish back to it right now. I'm still going to wait out the cycle process and go from there.

 

[Robink]

Sorry for your losses. Hope everything goes smoothly from here.

 

[chris75]

The first picture is the many 5 gallon buckets of RO/DI water that we used to fill the tank and the second is the many that have been emptied. The next picture is me trying to keep the live rocks wet. Then I actually had an empty stand for once. It's usually filled to the max with the filter and other odds and ends. Finally the tank is filled and waiting for the water to clear so that I can take the rocks and build a new wall with some caves and cut through's for the fish. I just can't see in there right now to build one and I didn't think to do it when the water was half way. Does anybody think that there is too much of a sand bed in there? My wife seems to think so but usually we loose some when we sift the sand during water changes. At max, it may be two inches thick. I think it's just right but I just want to get some other opinions.