My first major mistake in reefing was made in the early stages of building out tank. I got a "deal" on crushed coral. I bought five 40lbs bags for $60 bucks and thought man i made out like a bandit. So I used it for a remote DSB in my sump, 6 inches of sand then used the rest for 4 inches in my DT. First words out of my wife's mouth at the time was I don't like it, I think there will be problems. I discounted her worries and said oh it will be fine. About 3 weeks into cycle I decided she was right I hate the look so I masked it by adding some medium grain sand. It helped with the appearance but well not with the other issues. For the last year my tank has had nitrates through the roof. Sometimes No3 got to 80, after a large water change I might get it down to 40. So my first thought is bad test so bought 2 other brands and all three were real close. So I started vodka dosing did that for 2 months and saw no changes in anything. I read up on bio-pellets and moved to them bought a reactor and ran pellets for 6 more months with 0 reduction of nitrates. I would do a 50% water change and get nitrates down to 30 or 40 and back up to 60+ the next week. I changed the foods I used, rinsed them, tried everything until one day I did a search and found the problem. So the 200lbs of crushed coral in my tank was nothing more than a nitrate factory by trapping all of the detritus.
So started the change out. I purchased 200 lbs of a mix of sugar fine sand and Special Grade Reef Sand. Got a huge tub mixed it all up and went to step one of the process. I took my sump off line and emptied it out, pulled the crushed coral out and replaced it with the new dry sand. Sand was rinsed before going in and well that became problem number one. The 50lbs of coarse crushed coral takes up a ton more space than 50lbs of sand. So I used a ton of sand in this switch out. I would have taken pictures of this process but it is a sump in a stand. Not much to look at here. I can not believe how much crap literally came out of this. It was the grossest looking water and muck I have ever seen or so I thought. So this process took me a good 4 hours. got everything put back in place, put new water in and let a HOB filter work for a while to clear the water. I went to a local reefer and grabbed a couple of cups of sand from his tank to help seed this new bed and waited.
Two weeks later My wife said so when are you going to clean up the tubs of sand sitting in front of the tank stand. I replied when finished with the change over taking the hint that I needed to go back to work on this. I made up 100 gallons of salt water. I figured I had a bit over 125lbs of sand left so I knew I would be ok to do the first 1/3 of the tank. I have 7 100 micron socks all ready to go and I started into the first third of the Display tank. Took out all of the corals that were easy to get off the rocks and sand bed. Pulled the rock and placed them in buckets with tank water. filled the tank back up to full as to keep the system running during this process. I started removing the crushed coral and sand and man did it make a mess of the tank. I was changing out filter socks every 15 minutes during this. When we had 5 pulled off my wife would go wash them. Between breaking down the first 1/3 of the DT, swapping out the sand and rescaping it took just shy of 6 hours. As sand came out the water level went down, we replaced water to keep clean water coming into the system. We had the water coming into the filter sock then the skimmer was fed from the same chamber. The skimmer was pulling out the fine particulates nicely. We also added filter floss to the baffle leading to the return pump to pull the rest of the gunk out. We were pumping back fairly clean water to the DT. As we were adding sand and rock back to the tank we were sucking water back out at the same time trying to suck out as much gunk as we could. Here is the before and after
Before
After
My wife said i like the island, that is how I wanted it from the beginning. So that is the rescaping concept we went with.
Three days after this switch out I checked levels again. No ammonia, no nitrite, nitrates were 25 salifert and hanna check showed phosphates .17. They were at zero prior to the switch out. I changed out GFO and let the tank go for 10 days to settle before proceeding. We purchased another 125 lbs of sand, cleaned all of the filter socks and took my daughter to the grand parents for the weekend. We started the process at 11 am. We again pulled all corals that were easy to remove from the rocks they went into a tub with heater and power head. We took out all of the rock on the right side of the tank and placed it in 5 gallon buckets with tank water. We placed a small divider into the sand bed between where we were going to work and where we had already changed it out. We vacuumed the sand and pulled out the remaining 2/3 of the sand bed. Same process as before changing out socks every 15 or so minutes and adding clean water as the level was changing. 10 hours later we had all old sand out and new sand in. We had put back rock as my wife wanted it and did a 30% water change. All left over rock from the DT went into the sump. Here are before and after shots.
Before
After
There are caves and open areas that are hard to see with the black background but the fish love them.
So that was on July 7th. I have don't two small 10% water changes since. Still running gfo. As of now my tank has no ammonia, no nitrite. Nitrates are around 15ish, and phosphates are .00. I am starting back with my regular 20% wc schedule weekly. I added several more members to my CUC as I know we lost some in the transition. At one point My wife was actually sifting through sand pulling out critters to save them. Her in gloves going ooooh a bristle worm then moving him to a safe container til we were done. The only effect we have had is some detritus buildup on the rock and a bit of green algae growing on the sand. Like I said we added a few dozen different snails back to the tank hoping to help with this. I have blown the stuff off of the rocks daily for the last week. In all I have spent right at 23 hours on this project to make sure I did it right and not to kill anything. Fish and inverts survived through this. No corals were harmed in any of this. The point to my article is research and do it right the first time. Don't wait for a year to go by to figure out a mistake. I am doing vinegar dosing to help boost bacteria in my tank but other than that and gfo we are only doing water changes and keeping nitrates low. During this process we found other little things that needed attention and was a nice wake up call to do proper maintenance to your tank. I welcome any question or comments on this. And a big huge thanks to Sk8r who were the best answering all of my questions during this. She is a real asset to this community. Thanks again.
Jason
So started the change out. I purchased 200 lbs of a mix of sugar fine sand and Special Grade Reef Sand. Got a huge tub mixed it all up and went to step one of the process. I took my sump off line and emptied it out, pulled the crushed coral out and replaced it with the new dry sand. Sand was rinsed before going in and well that became problem number one. The 50lbs of coarse crushed coral takes up a ton more space than 50lbs of sand. So I used a ton of sand in this switch out. I would have taken pictures of this process but it is a sump in a stand. Not much to look at here. I can not believe how much crap literally came out of this. It was the grossest looking water and muck I have ever seen or so I thought. So this process took me a good 4 hours. got everything put back in place, put new water in and let a HOB filter work for a while to clear the water. I went to a local reefer and grabbed a couple of cups of sand from his tank to help seed this new bed and waited.
Two weeks later My wife said so when are you going to clean up the tubs of sand sitting in front of the tank stand. I replied when finished with the change over taking the hint that I needed to go back to work on this. I made up 100 gallons of salt water. I figured I had a bit over 125lbs of sand left so I knew I would be ok to do the first 1/3 of the tank. I have 7 100 micron socks all ready to go and I started into the first third of the Display tank. Took out all of the corals that were easy to get off the rocks and sand bed. Pulled the rock and placed them in buckets with tank water. filled the tank back up to full as to keep the system running during this process. I started removing the crushed coral and sand and man did it make a mess of the tank. I was changing out filter socks every 15 minutes during this. When we had 5 pulled off my wife would go wash them. Between breaking down the first 1/3 of the DT, swapping out the sand and rescaping it took just shy of 6 hours. As sand came out the water level went down, we replaced water to keep clean water coming into the system. We had the water coming into the filter sock then the skimmer was fed from the same chamber. The skimmer was pulling out the fine particulates nicely. We also added filter floss to the baffle leading to the return pump to pull the rest of the gunk out. We were pumping back fairly clean water to the DT. As we were adding sand and rock back to the tank we were sucking water back out at the same time trying to suck out as much gunk as we could. Here is the before and after
Before
After
My wife said i like the island, that is how I wanted it from the beginning. So that is the rescaping concept we went with.
Three days after this switch out I checked levels again. No ammonia, no nitrite, nitrates were 25 salifert and hanna check showed phosphates .17. They were at zero prior to the switch out. I changed out GFO and let the tank go for 10 days to settle before proceeding. We purchased another 125 lbs of sand, cleaned all of the filter socks and took my daughter to the grand parents for the weekend. We started the process at 11 am. We again pulled all corals that were easy to remove from the rocks they went into a tub with heater and power head. We took out all of the rock on the right side of the tank and placed it in 5 gallon buckets with tank water. We placed a small divider into the sand bed between where we were going to work and where we had already changed it out. We vacuumed the sand and pulled out the remaining 2/3 of the sand bed. Same process as before changing out socks every 15 or so minutes and adding clean water as the level was changing. 10 hours later we had all old sand out and new sand in. We had put back rock as my wife wanted it and did a 30% water change. All left over rock from the DT went into the sump. Here are before and after shots.
Before
After
There are caves and open areas that are hard to see with the black background but the fish love them.
So that was on July 7th. I have don't two small 10% water changes since. Still running gfo. As of now my tank has no ammonia, no nitrite. Nitrates are around 15ish, and phosphates are .00. I am starting back with my regular 20% wc schedule weekly. I added several more members to my CUC as I know we lost some in the transition. At one point My wife was actually sifting through sand pulling out critters to save them. Her in gloves going ooooh a bristle worm then moving him to a safe container til we were done. The only effect we have had is some detritus buildup on the rock and a bit of green algae growing on the sand. Like I said we added a few dozen different snails back to the tank hoping to help with this. I have blown the stuff off of the rocks daily for the last week. In all I have spent right at 23 hours on this project to make sure I did it right and not to kill anything. Fish and inverts survived through this. No corals were harmed in any of this. The point to my article is research and do it right the first time. Don't wait for a year to go by to figure out a mistake. I am doing vinegar dosing to help boost bacteria in my tank but other than that and gfo we are only doing water changes and keeping nitrates low. During this process we found other little things that needed attention and was a nice wake up call to do proper maintenance to your tank. I welcome any question or comments on this. And a big huge thanks to Sk8r who were the best answering all of my questions during this. She is a real asset to this community. Thanks again.
Jason
