Trying to bring my reef tank back from the dead.

[rackmsukr]

I have a 150 gal DT. The tank has been established for about 10 years. I have around 150 lbs of live rock & I also have a 55 gal sump with nice skimmer and a refugium. Here is a vid of what I used to have...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1CPRP0ssvw

At one time the tank was full of soft corals, fish, and other inverts. I had VHO lights over the tank and then at one point I switched to some cheap LED's. It was a thing of beauty, but over the past year things started going to hell. :hmm5:

One of my lights died, and shortly after that, as you would imagine, so did all of the corals. Then, the pump on my skimmer quit on me. I really just kind of let the tank go at that point. I literally went months at a time with no filtration, barely any light, and no water changes.

Somehow, the fish all survived, but I now have a lot of remnants of dead corals .

I considered trying to sell everything off but the tank is built into the wall and I didn't want to deal with getting rid of it. So now I have decided I am going to try to get the tank back to it's old glory!

I replaced my RODI filter with a brand new unit, bought a new skimmer, and also bought some nice new LED's. The fish all seem to be healthy and happy now that I'm trying to get my water back to where it needs to be to keep corals.
My Nitrates are still off the charts but I'm trying to get that fixed with frequent water changes. I want to get my water good again and then start adding some corals.

What is my next plan of action?
I figure I need to clean out all the dead coral skeletons and try to get the rock in the tank clean. What is the best way to get the rocks cleaned up? I was thinking of removing them out of the tank and swishing them around and giving them a light scrubbing in some fresh salt water. Anything else I can do to get back on track?

Here is a current pic of the DT...


Thanks in advance for any advice!

 

[Silly clownfish]

I would not try to clean all of the rock in one shot - you don't want to wipe out your biofilter. Plus that would be a long day...

I would take out maybe a third at a time and either scrub in salt water or soak in vinegar water for a few days if you think you might have absorbed phosphates. If scrubbing in salt water, use water out of the tank, and use thst as part of your water change. No point making fresh salt water just to waste it!

While the rock is out siphon the substrate out of the temporarily empty area and replace with fresh, rinsed substrate.

Good luck!

Kim

 

[rackmsukr]

What is the best thing to do to the substrate?
I have white sand, about 2" deep.
Should I just run it all through a strainer to remove any old shells / small fragments and then rinse in salt water?
If I were to get new live sand, Any recommendations of a brand name to use?

 

[dartier]

Well the good news is no tank is truly dead. No matter how neglected there will always be a food web present and a range of creatures that are prospering.

Let me explain what I mean. The first reef tank I had was about 25 years ago. I was not successful keeping anything that I wanted to keep alive. Even fish were out of my range. After I failed at pretty much everything, I kept the tank running, stopped water changes, eventually the heater broke, I started topping up with tap water, etc. The only thing that was still working was the 5 year old metal halide lights (original bulbs) and the return pump. When I finally took it down 5 years later, I expected to find nothing alive. Boy was I wrong. What I found was a plethora of snails, small crabs, and tons of cool little anemones (which today I now know as Aiptasia ). I had not even fed the tank in years. There was some hair algae in the tank, but there was also the most coralline algae I have ever seen. On the side of the tank closest to the window, the coraline was over a 1/4" thick. It was like vertical sheets of live rock.

In your situation I would slowly improve the environment, start doing water changes, add some fast growing soft corals to soak up the excess nutrients. Just be careful what you choose. Mushrooms love excess nutrients, but they also can become a problem unto themselves. Green Star Polyps may be a good choice as they spread and do not pickup and move like mushrooms. Just be prepared to remove them as they increase and trade them in for credit.

I also would not bother cleaning the rocks. The GHA will disappear on it's own once the nutrients are declining. You can even use it as an indicator. When you see the GHA being replaced with coraline, you can take that as a signal that you can start adding easy SPS or LPS corals.

You may want to vacuum the sand, but again taking it out and washing it is probably overkill.

So I guess my advice boils down to, improve your husbandry and the tank will react to your changes slowly over time.

Dennis

 

[Walla2GSP]

I would just keep doing what you are doing and go slow. I just did the same thing over the summer, and didn't remove any of the rock for cleaning. Blasted them with powerheads and a turkey baster and reaquascaped a couple of times. Changed the sock filter daily and cleaned out the protein skimmer. I added some new sand sifting snails to clean the substrate. Over time with water changes and mostly dosing I got parameters back where I wanted and life just exploded in the tank, some of my mushroom corals even came back from the dead. For nitrates, you could temporarily use carbon dosing to encourage bacteria populations till numbers are closer to a safe range.

 

[ReefinND]

Very interesting, subscribing to see how it comes along.

 

[Tanthaitrung]

I was bored, because of aiptasias and fallowed my tank for few months. Then the Copperband came, cleaned aiptasias. He made me happy and returned the hobby.

I started to remove GHA, slowly took out all of sand bed (recently bare bottom), did big water change regularly, tested all parameters, changed new lights, added more powerhead.

It takes few weeks to recover as it was

 

[bill120reef]

I just brougjt my 180 back after 2 yrs without any live stock avcept 2 cucumbers which i was sirprised to see.
My total water capacity is around 300 to 360 gallons
First i scraped glass and rocks of any hair algae followed by a 50 gallon water change, left all lighting off.
I than did 40 gallon changes every 3 to 4 days .
It took about 3 weeks for me to get the tank back into proper parameters.
At that point i started using my lights bringing the led lights up slowly and removings diatoms as they grew with a syphon, this lasted for about another 3 weeks.
Durring all of this i would also move unwanted rock or corals to my sump and fuge.
I added macro algae and pods to my fuge and ran lights 24hrs on it.
Since then i have added live stock slowly allowing tje system to redevelope with what i think is great success.
Good luck!