Beginner Mistake

[ReeferNoob4ever]

Thank you for your responses. I did read about that and just yesterday gave it a tiny little bit of zooplankton with a turkey baster during feeding time. I turn off all the power heads and filters for about 20 mins. The coco seems to be happy thus far and I even saw it poop.

 

[WatDatThing]

I guess my fear is nitrate building up and coming out in mass proportions one day.

Go bare bottom if you "fear". Nitrate don't just come out from sand bed at high level. Every post I ever read where this is a problem is when they completely rearranged the rock work or moving tank and stirred up the sand too much. This is why some people stir the sand a little bit when they do water change. Your water circulation and bio-filtration is supposed to keep your nitrate level low. Just my opinion.

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[ReeferNoob4ever]

I decided to vacuum my aragonite after having a small end of cycle diatom bloom. It worked out well I think. I will likely only clean the sand once a month or even less.

I decided to take my mechanical filter out after watching a video by BRS on YouTube. This is a great wealth of knowledge channel I highly recommend for the noobs and pros!

Eventually, I will be brave enough to remove the bio shields and use the HOB filter to run carbon or gfo if needed.

Thanks everyone for the advice. I couldn't help but vacuum out my sand. It was bugging me that I only had 2 inchs of substrate and not 3 or more. I was afraid the nitrogen exchange process wouldn't occur and Id be left with a bunch of trapped nitrate in the sand.