madmax7774
New member
I have a friend with a 5 year old 120g fowlr system. He faithfully does a 30g water change once per month. There is roughly 175-200lbs of live rock in it and the system has been relatively stable for over 4 years. The problem is that when he bought it and set it up, the LFS sold him a wet/dry filter, and nothing else. As you may already guess, after 4 years of use, he has extremely high nitrates and phosphates. (85-100ppm nitrates depending when the test is run)
I have been working with him to get him off the wet/dry, and onto a protein skimmer/refugium setup. We put some cheato in his sump last month, and it is growing like wildfire. Already his phosphates are undetectable. He bought an octopus 150 recirc skimmer, which we are plumbing in this weekend. My question is, what is the safest way to get the wet/dry out of the system without crashing the system. I am thinking that with the age of the tank, and the volume of live rock, that we should be able to just take the wet/dry out of the loop after the protein skimmer is broken in. We are going to be adding a denitrator coil to the system as well to slowly bring down the nitrates. phospahtes are not a problem at this time, as the cheato seems to have eaten it all up. Over the last 4 months, I have given him numerous frags of various soft corals, and they are all growing really well, as they obviously like the high nutrient levels. He also added a tunze 6045 to his tank to get some circulation gowing too. His lights are T5's and for the softies that he seems to like are working well. Can anyone give me insight as to what would be the best way to remove the wet/dry from the system safely?? anyone tried to do a filtration switchover like this before?? any help is greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
John
I have been working with him to get him off the wet/dry, and onto a protein skimmer/refugium setup. We put some cheato in his sump last month, and it is growing like wildfire. Already his phosphates are undetectable. He bought an octopus 150 recirc skimmer, which we are plumbing in this weekend. My question is, what is the safest way to get the wet/dry out of the system without crashing the system. I am thinking that with the age of the tank, and the volume of live rock, that we should be able to just take the wet/dry out of the loop after the protein skimmer is broken in. We are going to be adding a denitrator coil to the system as well to slowly bring down the nitrates. phospahtes are not a problem at this time, as the cheato seems to have eaten it all up. Over the last 4 months, I have given him numerous frags of various soft corals, and they are all growing really well, as they obviously like the high nutrient levels. He also added a tunze 6045 to his tank to get some circulation gowing too. His lights are T5's and for the softies that he seems to like are working well. Can anyone give me insight as to what would be the best way to remove the wet/dry from the system safely?? anyone tried to do a filtration switchover like this before?? any help is greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
John
