remove bioballs all at once?

[Tava176]

I am looking to remove my bioballs to make room for a small refugium in my sump.

1. Can I simply remove all the bioballs at once and begin installing the fuge?

2. Am I ok pulling the sump out, placing a couple of powerheads and some airstones in the display tank for circulation for 48 hours?

2. Also, am I ok removing bioballs and begin building a 12" x 12" fuge? (the sump will obviously have to be out of commission for 48 hours for the caulk to dry I have to build some walls for the fuge).

3. Display tank will also be without skimmer for 48 hours.

I have a light bio load. Here are my specs:

90 gallon tank up for 1 year with 100 LB live rock.
5 small fish
2 bristle stars
1 crab
1 shrimp
All corals listed below are small frags that are an inch or so in size (except the brown cap).
1 torch
1 frogspawn
1 montipora digitana
1 pulsing zenia
1 four inch brown cap

thank you in advance for your advise.

 

[mg426]

I would be cautious about removing all of the bio balls at once.I removed mine but went slowly over about a month.Did not have anything bad happen, and my nitrates slowly dropped to less than 5 ppm. You could always just build another say 15 gallon tank before your sump if you got the room.Not hard to do and fairly cheap.You could have this drain into your sump with a bit of thought.This way you still get the fuge and can use your existing sump for a reserve in the event of a power failure.if you run without a skimmer for any length of time you could always use polyfilters.But do keep am close eye on things for sure

 

[Tava176]

MG426,

Unrotunately, I do not have any more room to spare. Right now I am showing 0 nitrates as well. I am really wondering if a small 12x12 fuge is really even going to be the trouble of doing the work. I guess it would be. I DO need a place to put some macro algae. I also wanted to get a Mandarin adn was thinking that I fuge may be a safe haven for pods to grow. I would order some pods on the internet and seed the fuge with them. I 12x12 fuge with 8 inches of water depth is only going to be around 4 gallons.

 

[Tava176]

bump..

 

[mg426]

can you set up a fuge above your tank and have it gravity feed back to the main tank. pretty easy to do

 

[Anemonebuff]

Years back I removed all mine at once with no noticeable change in water chemistry.

 

[diemaker]

you should remove the bio balls at about 10% every 4-5 days to let the tankajust if you remove them all at once the tank could crash

jmo

 

[waldomas]

The bacteria that grow on youre bio balls will be replaced with new bacteria that will grow on youre rocks. This will probably make youre water have a bit of sediment in it. It will come from the rocks when the new bacteria displace it.