Okay, I'm going to try to condense anything and clear up any possible confusion.
Kyoto Before: It is a 300g reef ready tank with dual overflows located in the corners and sits on an old metal stand that is skinned in wood. The drains are two 1.5" pipes to a trickle filter. The trickle filter is in three stages and I am guessing that it is approximately 36"x12"x18" and has a maximum capacity of roughly 30 gallons. Each chamber is equal in size. The first two are filled with bioballs. Each chamber gets one overflow drain trickling through it. The return pump is a Little Giant of unknown size that has a 1/2" return outlet. After doing some looking up on
www.lgpc.com I came to the conclusion that the return pump is a measly 500gph. This is immidiately "T"ed off to go to two seperate Loc-Line Return nozzles. This is the ONLY water flow they have. No powerheads or anything. The substrate is about 3 inches or so of crushed coral and about 50lbs of "rock" if we are lucky. Some of it is plastic rock that you would get for a freshwater aquarium. It's inhabitants are a (approximate) 10" Dog Face Puffer, 18"-24" Snowflake Eel, and a 8" diameter California Round Ray. No clean up crew. Fish are fed about 1oz of food a piece nightly :eek1: It's water parameters were 0 Ammonia, 0 Nitrites, Unkown Nitrates (I speculate >500ppm), 8.0 pH (Most likely due to lack of O2 from low flow and high CO2 from large tank mates), 9 dKH, and 380 ppm Calcium. Temperature was 78*F and specific gravity was 1.028. It was apparent that we had one heck of a job to do.
Proposed Goals: Most likely there will be a day that we will have to go up there when they are closed and do a complete over haul of this tank. But for now, our goal is to reduce nitrates and getting other water parameters a little more in line ASAP without shocking the fish. Our ultimate goals which will take months to do is to replace crushed coral substrate with a DSB for denitrification and allow the ray to bury himself, remove bioballs which is an obvious source of nitrates. Add a lot more live rock, but only enough so there is room for the ray to swim. Add additional lighting to increase appeal and possibly add some hardy soft corals or corallimorphs for more visual appeal. Add a clean up crew and cross our fingers. We are thinking if we had more rock, there would be more room for a clean up crew to hide and not be eaten. Change the trickle filter into a sump/refugium. The refugium would consist of a very deep sandbed, live rock rubble, and chaetomorpha algae as an algal scrubber. Increase pump size for additional flow. We may have to move the tank out an inch or so if we get to do an overhaul. Add powerheads if possible. Hidden Tunzes/Seios would be sweet. Train employees how to properly take care of the tank and not overfeed. Attempt to plumb an auto-top off system. We might not be able to do that because it would have to be plumbed from the back of the kitchen, in the walls or ceiling, and then to the tank. I think that covers it. DSB, more rock, sump/refugium, increased flow. Alsmost forgot. Add a skimmer, too.
What Was Done: Oh boy, was this an endeavor, but I loved every minute of it. First of all, we cleaned. Period. Under the stand, the outside of the tank, the inside, on top, the lights, you name it. We then did an emergency 150g water change. We had to resort to dechlorinated tap water, but in future smaller additions we will use his RO/DI unit more often. Plus it's only a FOWLR tank and there isn't a cleanup crew. And we changed his two OLD 36" T8 NO bulbs to 2 new 48" T8 NO 6500K bulbs. His ballast could power it! He also has a single ballast for a single 24", 36", or 48" T8 NO bulb. It currently power an OLD 36" bulb. Walmart didn't have a 6500K 36" bulb at 3AM, so we skipped it this time. We plan on getting replacement waterproof end caps and doing 3 48" NO 6500K bulbs until we can get a nice lighting setup later. It doesn't sound like much, but it was almost like a whole new tank when we were done. The only bad part is, when we first tested the Nitrates, it was off the chart on three different test kits tested multiple times. The highest reading of a test kit was 200 ppm. It passed the last color and maxed out in a matter of a few seconds. You needed to wait 60 seconds for an accurate reading. The worst part is, after doing the 50% water change, the nitrates were still maxed out. At least it took about 5-10 seconds for the Nitrates to max out this time instead of a couple of seconds. If I had to guess what the nitrates are actually, I would say that it was easily 500 ppm. It wouldn't surprise me if it was 750 ppm. Truthfully, I don't know how these fish are alive, active, and growing. I guess it goes to show you how adaptable fish are. Our plan is to do 50-150g water changes every weekend until we can get the nitrates to a readable level.
***Here is a little something fun. Little Giant Pump Company is located in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma! I had no idea!
