need advice

[cjc]

Hi guys

First off sorry for the long post

It has been a while since I have been around but I am getting back into the hobby. :wave: I need your advice on an issue I am running into.

About a year ago my Ca reactor backed up and then broke free shooting the Ca in the tank through the roof. Lost all my corals and all but 3 fish. :thumbdown

Since then the tank has been a fish only tank.
Severely neglected doing water changes about once every other month or so. This led to a algae problem.

Taken care of the algae problem and am trying to get back to a reef tank again.

This is my issue; my dsb has a hard crust to it. I have not tried to dig into it to see if it is solid throughout. I do know that when I turned on my tunze streams back on it did not blow any sand into the water.

Should I try to remove the crust, if it is not too deep or pull out all the sand.... or ???

Thanks for any advice you can give me on this. I will try to make it to the next frag meeting.

 

[CloWn SpaWn]

iam guessing the sand got like form all the ca bulid up? what are your perimeters? if not to bad. i dont see why you can remove the top layer. but if it was me i would try to wash it out or just get new sand and reseed it. better safe that sorry imo.

 

[rljlll]

you could put it in a 5 gal bucket and use a wood post or something big crush it back up and put it back in just a thought

 

[Pyrrhus]

with the top layer of sand fused solid, I highly doubt that there are any effective DSB critters left in the lower layers of the substrate since they would be starved for food/oxygen.

your best bet is to replace the DSB if that is your preferred method of reefkeeping.

did you have a solenoid and controller on the CA RX? that should have shut off Co2 well before it could crash the tank or bind the sand.

 

[cjc]

Thanks for the replies.
I will begin breaking down the tank soon.
needed to redo the aquascape anyway

I am not positive how it happened but it seemed as if the flow from the reactor to the drip got blocked so everything stayed running and then it started to flow again .

when i got home everything was cloudy and most of the corals were gone within a day or so.