Bare bottom difficulties?

[Hungldhcm]

You’ll be good. I did same setup on my large basement frag tank, lots of live rock in sump and a few pieces up top, seeded rock from established tanks, had coralline growing by month 3 and SPS in and thriving by month 4. I’m now dosing kalk and two part to keep up with the SPS demand in month 6

Tks, but i only have dr

I am a BB fan, have been for many years, my only advice is if you can and the price tag is not out of your reach, start with as much live rock as you can afford even if it's only a couple of pieces.
Years ago I started with alot of live rock, my 130 gallon tank was completely filled with live rock and my ugly phase was a couple of weeks rather than a few months which I experienced this go round. 14 months ago all that live rock that I used 32 years ago was now dead rock as it was sitting in my basement for all those years collecting dust.
My first few months were smooth sailing and then for 6 or 7 months I got all the headaches you get from new tank syndrome. But close to the year mark, I achieved tank maturity.
Compared to starting with all live rock, starting with dry rock is hard but not impossible.
Good luck with your build

Tks! It is nearly impossible to find trusted live rock here. I will try to cycle about 2 months and hoping to have minimum ugly stage

 

[Hungldhcm]

Tks!

What about bare bottom positives? 14000+ gph flowing in the tank with no sand flying everywhere. Great for SPS

 

[Hungldhcm]

So you're going to wait until Sept/Oct to put in things like Acros.....RIGHT????

Wow, so long?

 

[Hungldhcm]

I am a BB fan, have been for many years, my only advice is if you can and the price tag is not out of your reach, start with as much live rock as you can afford even if it's only a couple of pieces.
Years ago I started with alot of live rock, my 130 gallon tank was completely filled with live rock and my ugly phase was a couple of weeks rather than a few months which I experienced this go round. 14 months ago all that live rock that I used 32 years ago was now dead rock as it was sitting in my basement for all those years collecting dust.
My first few months were smooth sailing and then for 6 or 7 months I got all the headaches you get from new tank syndrome. But close to the year mark, I achieved tank maturity.
Compared to starting with all live rock, starting with dry rock is hard but not impossible.
Good luck with your build

May i ask a question?
If i ask my friend to give some live rock? What should i do to make it safe before putting into my tank? Thank you!!!

 

[sfin52]

Wow, so long?

Dry rock doesn't have the biodiversity that real live rock does. This is what let's the tank mature at a much faster rate. Dry rock has some really stages.
The biodiversity will come when you add things and will take a while to populate.

Even a couple cups full of rubble will help speed things up but nothing like a couple of peices of real live rock.

 

[sfin52]

May i ask a question?
If i ask my friend to give some live rock? What should i do to make it safe before putting into my tank? Thank you!!!

There's a way to raise nitrates high to kill all nasties but leave bacteria intact.
@Eagle_Steve advice.

 

[Hungldhcm]

There's a way to raise nitrates high to kill all nasties but leave bacteria intact.
@Eagle_Steve advice.

So, could you tell me what to to to make it safe? Tks in advance!

 

[sfin52]

So, could you tell me what to to to make it safe? Tks in advance!

We need to wait for eagle_steve to reply.

 

[Hungldhcm]

We need to wait for eagle_steve to reply.

Yes, thank you!

 

[Eagle_Steve]

So, could you tell me what to to to make it safe? Tks in advance!

What is currently in the tank now? If anything alive, it will nuke most of it.

 

[X-37B]

May i ask a question?
If i ask my friend to give some live rock? What should i do to make it safe before putting into my tank? Thank you!!!

Is the live rock comming from an established system?
If it is you should be able to put it right in. Keep it in buckets of water during transport.

I started my nano cube with all live rock from my 2 other systems with no cycle.

I started my 120 with 50% live and had acros in after 1 month.

Both my 120 and nano cube are BB.

 

[flashsmith]

I recently set up a 25 lagoon frag system AIO. I went bare bottom and almost instantly regretted it. I thought I would use some bio media which seasoned in my sump system for bacteria. I had the worst gha outbreak I've seen. I've never had gha in my other 2 tanks. It was so bad I started losing some coral. I beefed up my cuc which by then it was too late. I did some research and found out that keeping a small bare bottom frag system stable is very difficult without something for bacteria to live in. So I ended up putting a bag of sand in and within a week everything finally stabilized and the gha is going away fast. This is just my experience and I know in a large system things would be different. But it worked for me. In a limited space tank like mine lr wasn't an option.

 

[X-37B]

I recently set up a 25 lagoon frag system AIO. I went bare bottom and almost instantly regretted it. I thought I would use some bio media which seasoned in my sump system for bacteria. I had the worst gha outbreak I've seen. I've never had gha in my other 2 tanks. It was so bad I started losing some coral. I beefed up my cuc which by then it was too late. I did some research and found out that keeping a small bare bottom frag system stable is very difficult without something for bacteria to live in. So I ended up putting a bag of sand in and within a week everything finally stabilized and the gha is going away fast. This is just my experience and I know in a large system things would be different. But it worked for me.

My nano cube is 1 month old. I did use the baskets and filled them with eheim substrate pro and matrix. The baskets were in my other systems sumps for a month aquiring bacteria. I have since removed 1 basket, matrix, as it kept filling with air. This cause my ato to fluctuate. Now its doing fine.

 

[Hungldhcm]

What is currently in the tank now? If anything alive, it will nuke most of it.

I just have a layout, 2 liters of matrix, 2 filter blocks, that'all

 

[Karliefish]

If you are using live rock then you should be ok in getting your bare bottom tank stabilized. However, speaking from personal experience, if you are doing bare-bottom and dry rock be prepared for a very long maturing process. I’ve had my 365G tank up-and-running now for 1 year and I’m still waiting for SPS corals to really take-off and grow. If I could do a redo , I’d only do bare-bottom with all live rock.

 

[Hungldhcm]

Is the live rock comming from an established system?
If it is you should be able to put it right in. Keep it in buckets of water during transport.

I started my nano cube with all live rock from my 2 other systems with no cycle.

I started my 120 with 50% live and had acros in after 1 month.

Both my 120 and nano cube are BB.

Tks

 

[Hungldhcm]

If you are using live rock then you should be ok in getting your bare bottom tank stabilized. However, speaking from personal experience, if you are doing bare-bottom and dry rock be prepared for a very long maturing process. I’ve had my 365G tank up-and-running now for 1 year and I’m still waiting for SPS corals to really take-off and grow. If I could do a redo , I’d only do bare-bottom with all live rock.

Tks!

 

[Nano-DaveJ]

Rock also hold bacteria but sand is a great place that doesn’t take up much room in the tank and holds bonus bacteria. Rocks are stable without sand but if you bump into one the sand will help it from jiggling.

Sand holds bacteria AND detritus. Bare bottom with the right flow can keep detritus from accumulating.

 

[Nano-DaveJ]

I recently set up a 25 lagoon frag system AIO. I went bare bottom and almost instantly regretted it. I thought I would use some bio media which seasoned in my sump system for bacteria. I had the worst gha outbreak I've seen. I've never had gha in my other 2 tanks. It was so bad I started losing some coral. I beefed up my cuc which by then it was too late. I did some research and found out that keeping a small bare bottom frag system stable is very difficult without something for bacteria to live in. So I ended up putting a bag of sand in and within a week everything finally stabilized and the gha is going away fast. This is just my experience and I know in a large system things would be different. But it worked for me. In a limited space tank like mine lr wasn't an option.

I had the opposite experience. Tons of algae until I removed my sand. My bare bottom tank has been great. The flow eliminates most of the detritus and whatever is left on the bottom is easy to see and remove. But my tank is a mixed reef with lots of rock, not just frag racks. I could see how that would be a challenge.

 

[inetjnky]

I just setup my system last year … 180g bare bottom with a 60g frag tank attached to the system. I have an overly tall refugium also attached. In the refugium I have 4 marinepure bricks and ARM small calcium reactor media to fill in the empty spaces. In my frag tank I have a small layer of small ARM media covering the bottom of the tank. In the display I stared out with all dry rock. The sump, frag tank, and refugium went online first and cycled for about 3 or 4 months before the display went online. I got diatom algea that looked stringy like hair algae but it went away in a few weeks time between adding plenty of snails for a cleanup crew. I believe I must have added close to 100 trocus snails and around 25 hermit crabs. Same thing happened in my display when it came online after cycling. Next I got cyano really bad that covered everything. But I dosed a very small amount of chemiclean and over dosed with prodibio biodigest. Chemickean went away after a few weeks. It came back again a week or two later and I repeated the process and it’s not come back since. I put the display online in June last year and Fast forward now, about 9 months later and the display has coralline growing so fast it’s literally covered almost the entire bottom and back of the tank and a large majority of the dry rock. I also added and seeded a decent amount of siporax media in a basket in my sump that water passes through back to the return chamber. So I have many layers of media for bacteria to grow on throughout the system. It works so well that now only is my tank stable and corals are growing well in my frag tank but I’ve had to start dosing nitrates to help keep them up.