This is just echoing what everyone else already stated, but all synthesized into the way I beat dinos and cyano, although I have to say that it's really hard to actually *beat* those two 100% permanently, but you can keep them from taking hold and not letting go... 3 day blackout is good to knock them back to give yourself time to do what everyone here has said. Here is my personal formula for beating those two things that reefers nightmares are made out of:
1. I *much* prefer to do the 3 day black-out at the end, and it will not hurt to stop the blackout now and restart it again at the end. As many people stated, a black out is much more effective against dinos and cyano when there is nothing else to use for energy besides light. They can both survive on light alone, but give them a food source besides photoradiation and CO2 and they feel like they're living a dream in Goldino Corral. [emoji14]
2. Vacuum the sand bed super well, until you can vacuum and the water is close to clear, instead of the nasty color and smell you'll get. Don't barf while you do this part.
I would use this as a water change, like everyone else, so have some fresh water mixed up.
3. Get an old canister filter and put the filter foam in the first tray, or bottom tray. Add to this part of a felt or small micron size mesh filter sock; what I did was cut an old felt one up to fit the dimensions of the tray. I guess you could also find felt or fine/small micron nylon mesh at a store that sells that stuff, but I was just lazy... You really want to make sure you aren't allowing the difficult-to-see micro particles back into your tank. In the second tray, add carbon, preferably ROX as it can pull crap from the water really quickly. Fill the top tray with Phosguard as it rapidly removes the PO4 that will be released by the sand. If you cannot use PhosGuard, use GFO. I was really liberal with how much I used, don't care about measuring as this is really temporary.
Here is an alternative to the mesh or felt: Poly filter pads in the bottom tray, or even on the top tray on top of the Phosguard; this is simply to use the color changing mechanism in Poly filter pads to see what's in your tank and filter it out, and secondly, to have a quick NO3 remover. Purigen is good at removing the organic nitrogenous waste before it turns into NO3, but not in removing the NO3 and other nitrogenous compounds that are part of the nastiness of the sand bed.
4. What I do is start to filter the water column and just get the canister filter running; hang the return on the side of the tank, then hold the intake on the surface of the rock , sucking up as much as possible. I also use the intake to suck up the "dicyano" directly. Get a brush in your dominant hand and scrub off the cyano and dicyano while holding the intake of the canister close to the brush to capture as much of the nasty critters as possible. I also use a turkey baster to get the detritus and crap off the rocks while I hold the intake tube close so the nasties don't completely escape into the water column.
5. Now take apart the canister filter and rinse the filter foam really well, same with the cut up felt or nylon mesh filter material, alternatively, pull the poly filter pad and check the color. Replace it with a new one if you wish, but you can keep using it as long as it's not clogged up. Rinse the tray of carbon super well until water is clear, same with the Phosguard tray. This time add Purigen to the Phosguard tray to help get nitrogen based organics out of the water column. You could also add the purigen to the carbon tray, doesn't really matter. I use so much carbon that I can't add anything else to that tray. But definitely add Purigen or some other nitrate remover at this point; you will release so much nitrogenous waste by cleaning like this that you will definitely need something.
6. Next, to get into the crevices of the rock and dislodge as much of the detritus from the pores of the rock, get a strong powerhead, hold it close to the rock surface and let it rip. I didn't do this to rocks that have corals on them, but do it to everything else, including the sand bed (to create a hurricane in my tank). Wow, talk about making the water murky, this will definitely do it.
7. Now put new filter socks in the sump, turn your powerheads up to keep that stuff in suspension and hopefully pulled into the overflow and filtered out by your filtration system in your sump.
8. Now we supersize your order by adding the canister filter to your tank. Hang the intake on one end, the return on the other, filled with all the stuff to clean your water, let that run while you do your blackout for 3 days, remember to completely cover your tank so no light whatever can get it. We don't want the survivors of the mustard gas treatment to be able to grasp hold of any kind of energy source. That's how I did it and I had a completely different tank when I uncovered it. I let the canister run for another week or so, then threw away all of the dicyano infected media, bleached the felt and the foam, did the same to the canister and got it ready to vacuum clean my sump.
If you want to, add chemi clean at this point to knock out the POW's... I don't add chemi clean unless I absolutely have to. It used to contain erythromycin, which is the antibiotic of choice for cyano, so if you want to put the cyano on death row, get some erythromycin and add it to your tank. This is a last gasp measure though....
9. Add MB-7 or another source of nitrifying bacteria. By creating a hurricane in the sand bed, and making a tornado rip through the pores of your rock, you also dislodged the good bacteria and then sucked it up with the canister. No worries though, that bacteria had too many candles on their cake anyway, so adding some new youngsters will help.
Cheers!
Lloyd
cyan. but i didn't change hours. I am trying to use more blue and a little less white with out hurting my tank.
