making some adjustments on my sps tank

[tycoakley]

Okay so ive been at the tank for about two hours now! I took out all the sand from the sump and i can tell already that im gonna love it. As far as sand in the display goes, i shiponed out four 5 gallon buckets of water and sand! Id say it would fill up the bucket about an 1/8 of the way. So i got a good amount out. Im def worried about the rocks setteling and some corals smashing to their demise. Def gonna take it slow with the sand removal and do it every 5 days until im happy! (Who knows). I may have to get some smaller rocks to help support anything that i feel may fall over. I will post some pics of the progress tomrw!!!

 

[bambam918]

Why do you want to remove your sand? It is a great filter. If you are set on 2-3 inch sand bed, I would keep it at 1-2 inches as anything between 2-4.5 inches does more harm than good. Also why take the substrate out of the sump? Again a great filter.

 

[tycoakley]

BAM BAM that's why im lowering the sand bed to 1-2 because the sand was never a true deep sand bed. I was at 2'' some places and 5'' at others. But i guess that's what happens with sugar fine sand and vortech pumps. But like i said im slowly lowering so i can have a 1-2'' bed and doing it slowly to make sure nothing moves and i look a coral due to taking a tumble. As far as my sump. I removed the sand for a couple reasons. The sand was old in the sump and i could tell it needed to go. It also was only 4-5 inches due to my trigger system sump that has the slit to allow water through. If it were any higher i would have had sand in my first chamber.

 

[tycoakley]

I am also going to put my reactor back on with just a small amount of GFO and i put a bag of rox carbon in my third stage chamber media area. Hopefully i can get a very nice slow tumble this way. Until i plumb my reactor to my return pump as i do in my frag trough and love. Im going to hope to see some better results out of this BRS reactor.

 

[tmz]

anything between 2-4.5 inches does more harm than good.

Why do you think so?

 

[tycoakley]

i cant wait to have my sand bed back to a ssb. Ive ran my tanks this way for 8 years and loved it. I just wanted to try something new with a DSB and i just dont like the look or some of the stuff ive read about them.

Hey tmz what were your thought of running biopellets on this system?

In other news i got the whole sump back in order and the reactor running gfo. I put a prefilter on my maxijet hopefully that will help out with keeping the reactor cleaner for a longer period of time and help with performance.

 

[tycoakley]

TMK care to chime in also on the light situation i have? T5 or the halide w/ PC?

 

[tycoakley]

woke up this morning to a slight shift in the aquascape. No broken corals thank god. But def going to have to get me hands wet tonight and get the base rocks a bit more steardy.