RBarth
Active Member
This past Saturday I did a tank swap from my 1.5 year IM 40 to a IM 60 SR. Planned this out perfectly...I thought lol. The one road block for a smooth transition was my rock. Beautiful rock but had vermatids and some GHA. UV bulb went out undetected for a bit, got patches of GHA but didn't really care cuz I would handle it when I moved the tank.
Rinsed the sand for like 5 hours a few days before. I used 90% of my old rock and added a few more nano pieces.
Took all the rock out to remove all the vermatids I could see and wire brushed the GHA off. Here's where I screwed up...I thought it would be good to just dump the rock in a bucket with diluted peroxide for 2 minutes. Well, smart guy basically killed his coraline. Brilliant. More on this.
Fill tank, not too much silt. Temp up. Rock in, fish in and sorry Brandon but I did add some turbo smart just to be safe. Tank was cloudy for the day. Corals n fish seemed ok. Next day still cloudy. Fish seemed a little wild, coral closing. Oh btw, all numbers are solid except PO4 upto .3 and did dose Nitrate to get it to 10. And lights at like 5%.
Day 3..nothing happy including me. Panic. 50% water change. Hours later it's worse. More panic. So I test the pH...8.8! Sheeet! Vinegar dose!!!
Day 4. Fish seem chill, corals ok but still cloudy. Ok, so I got a bloom I assume from killing my rock. Try and relax. PH still high and decide to calibrate my probe. Yep...waaaay off. Calibrate it and realize my pH was probably never high but now it's 7.5. Great.
Also never had detectable ammonia or nitrite.
Lessons: Calibrate. Don't dip ur rock in peroxide. Don't panic.
Guess I'll be riding out this bloom for a bit momore. Any feedback on what to do at this point and how much longer to leave the lights down low?
Rinsed the sand for like 5 hours a few days before. I used 90% of my old rock and added a few more nano pieces.
Took all the rock out to remove all the vermatids I could see and wire brushed the GHA off. Here's where I screwed up...I thought it would be good to just dump the rock in a bucket with diluted peroxide for 2 minutes. Well, smart guy basically killed his coraline. Brilliant. More on this.
Fill tank, not too much silt. Temp up. Rock in, fish in and sorry Brandon but I did add some turbo smart just to be safe. Tank was cloudy for the day. Corals n fish seemed ok. Next day still cloudy. Fish seemed a little wild, coral closing. Oh btw, all numbers are solid except PO4 upto .3 and did dose Nitrate to get it to 10. And lights at like 5%.
Day 3..nothing happy including me. Panic. 50% water change. Hours later it's worse. More panic. So I test the pH...8.8! Sheeet! Vinegar dose!!!
Day 4. Fish seem chill, corals ok but still cloudy. Ok, so I got a bloom I assume from killing my rock. Try and relax. PH still high and decide to calibrate my probe. Yep...waaaay off. Calibrate it and realize my pH was probably never high but now it's 7.5. Great.
Also never had detectable ammonia or nitrite.
Lessons: Calibrate. Don't dip ur rock in peroxide. Don't panic.
Guess I'll be riding out this bloom for a bit momore. Any feedback on what to do at this point and how much longer to leave the lights down low?
I'd do small water changes, 5% - 10% evey 2 - 3 days for a couple weeks and use GAC.
