Beginner in need of help with a picoreef

[Kaisentlaia]

The lights are driving lots of the growth, try to lower the intensity somehow

I have two lights: Leddy Tube 6W Marine (10000K) and Actinic (20000K), both on 9:00-14:00 and 16:00-21:00, and the blue on goes on an hour more til 22:00. I could cut the hours of the white light, would that help?

using old sand is fine the tap water cleans it well

True, but using new sand would probably be less work since it would take way less time to rinse.

I’d leave out peroxide this one round.

Will do, hopefully cleaning will be enough. Should I do a test cleaning on a small rock first to see how it goes?

 

[Rmckoy]

Keep in mind while cleaning rocks .
you do have green/ brown palys in that tank and possibly in the rocks which can produce palytoxin
Wear protective gear such as gloves , glasses , mask etc.

Opening a window a little in the room you’re working wouldn’t be a bad idea .

 

[Kaisentlaia]

Wear protective gear such as gloves , glasses , mask etc

I will, thank you for the reminder! This tank is pretty old and no one got sick from it yet but better safe than sorry.

 

[brandon429]

Agreed it’s ok to use new sand

yes agreed on small area test spray sounds good that’s safe and likely to help

 

[Kaisentlaia]

Update after a week from the last cleaning: parameters (salinity and alk) have been pretty stable, a little salinity fluctuation due to evaporation but nothing major, mostly between 1024 and 1026.

Kalkwasser is on it's way and I'm going to dose that to keep alk up in place of Kh Plus. I reapplied silicone to the 3.5 gal and it's not leaking anymore. I have a full bag of new sand I'm going to rinse up and use in place of the old one.

Algae grew back of course, not bad, not terrible (it was much MUCH worse before that thorough cleaning I did last week):

That single zoa polyp that opened up again looks definitely irritated by the algae surrounding it, hopefully it will bounce back after the tank swap.

I discovered that the pistol shrimp I didn't see for months is still alive and doing well! I hope I'll be able to catch it and move it safely to the new tank. The mantis shrimp will be much easier since she never comes out of her rock.

I'll update tomorrow and post a few pics of the new and hopefully sparkling clean tank.

 

[Kaisentlaia]

My plan was perfect but alas, I discovered I don't have enough salt to fill the new tank so I'll have to postpone and just do a small water change today instead, especially since salinity and alk are a bit too low for my liking: 1023 and 7.3 (probably due to a little spill and topping off with RODI). I ordered more salt that will hopefully arrive in a couple of days.

The good news is that I have everything ready for the move, the new sand is rinsed and already in the new (empty) tank, the RODI water is ready, kalkwasser arrived and I ordered some calcium and magnesium test kits so I'll be able to keep an eye on those as well.

The mantis shrimp has been behaving a bit weirdly lately and she might be about to molt so I don't mind postponing a couple of days. I was a bit worried about moving her while she's not her usual self.

Anyway after a lot of reading I think I might now understand what happened to my tank: the water has always been too clean for zoas and palys (0 phosphates and negligible nitrates since I'm feeding very little) but they were hanging in there. The big water change I did without testing probably caused a sudden drop of salinity and alk (I wasn't dosing Kh Plus at the time) and shocked the corals. Somewhat this encouraged algae and cyano growth, probably thanks to the coral tissue decay. The small water changes over the past months brought the parameters back to normal but the damage was done and the algae by then was thriving.

Thankfully the corals that suffered the most were the ugly ones (I especially disliked that brown paly) and likely of the most toxic kind, I've read about people desperately trying to get rid of them without success, so yay me? Meanwhile the sinularia, rhodactis and discosoma are still happy and thriving so I didn't actually lose much with this rookie mistake.

After moving to the 3.5 and making sure that the water parameters are indeed stable and the algae are under control I'm planning to get a couple of zoa frags to try and bring back some life into my poor little tank and to begin feeding the corals a bit as well.

 

[Kaisentlaia]

I'm still waiting for the salt but today Ca and Mg test kits (Salifert) came in the mail so I checked the water and... they're both too high :| As in off the charts high. Glad I checked before beginning to dose kalk...

I did some research and found out that the salt I'm using already contains both of them, that's why they're so high:

I've been mixing my water aiming to reach approx 33-34ppm of salinity so that's where all the Ca and Mg are coming from. Looks like there's nothing consuming them in my tank so through the weekly water changes they slowly crept up. Kh plus which I'm using to raise alk apparently does not contain any Mg or Ca, just carbonates (but I can't find any details on that)... and there is something consuming those since alk does get lower over time.

Looks like another, maybe slightly bigger water change (or multiple small ones over a couple of days) could be in order to lower Mg and Ca back to reasonable levels.

So memo to self: always check what's inside the products I'm putting in the tank before buying other stuff to add.

 

[Rmckoy]

I'm still waiting for the salt but today Ca and Mg test kits (Salifert) came in the mail so I checked the water and... they're both too high :| As in off the charts high. Glad I checked before beginning to dose kalk...

I did some research and found out that the salt I'm using already contains both of them, that's why they're so high:

I've been mixing my water aiming to reach approx 33-34ppm of salinity so that's where all the Ca and Mg are coming from. Looks like there's nothing consuming them in my tank so through the weekly water changes they slowly crept up. Kh plus which I'm using to raise alk apparently does not contain any Mg or Ca, just carbonates (but I can't find any details on that)... and there is something consuming those since alk does get lower over time.

Looks like another, maybe slightly bigger water change (or multiple small ones over a couple of days) could be in order to lower Mg and Ca back to reasonable levels.

So memo to self: always check what's inside the products I'm putting in the tank before buying other stuff to add.

Goes along with the number 1 rule
Never dose anything you can’t test the need for

 

[Kaisentlaia]

I decided to test some freshly mixed saltwater (I still had some leftover salt) and the results are definitely confusing.

The fresh sw tested off the chart high for Ca and Mg as well so it's not my tank. I mixed the water as usual, 190g of salt in 5L of water (so 38g/L). I'm using Salifert test kits and the max measurable amount is 1500ppm for Mg and 500ppm for CA so I tried mixing half sw and half RODI, test that and multiply by 2 to get the true value. Here are the results:

Parameter	Expected	Measured
Salinity (sg)	1025	1020
Ca (ppm)	411 (420mg/l/1.023)	680
Mg (ppm)	1300 (1330mg/l/1.023)	2060
Alk (dKh)	7.5	10.2

Soooo this is pretty weird. Either my refractometer is completely off and the actual salinity is much higher than what I'm measuring, or the refractometer is right and all the other parameters are much higher than what's stated on aquaforest's website.

My refractometer did test 1024 on my tank water as the LFS' one did, and it's testing 0 both on distilled and RODI water. It's a cheap optical one so it might be testing correctly at 0 and going bonkers on higher levels, I'm going to make a salt solution as per this article to check against a (more or less) known value.

Question: are this high levels of Ca and Mg dangerous? From a quick research doesn't look like it. Should I worry about salinity and alk only or should I try to lower Mg and Ca by using less reef salt and raising salinity using some other kind of salt? Maybe table salt?

 

[brandon429]

when we do rip cleans on nano reefs, the water params are never tested and we don’t care if brands are switched only concern is temp and salinity

has the deep clean been done

the new params simply don’t have to match the old, nothing in your reef demands that, it’s not an sps tank.

 

[brandon429]

You can see from fifty pages in the sand rinse thread on all fifty pages not one water parameter is listed and that does include sps tanks. This is a very helpful planning detail


we never asked if they were changing water brands because that won’t change the outcome. Never add table salt and no need to adjust any param from the new mix

 

[Kaisentlaia]

has the deep clean been done

Not yet, I'm still waiting for the salt that should hopefully arrive today. I'm planning to do the tank transfer/rip cleaning tomorrow.

I was planning to use only freshly mixed water for the new tank and discard the old tank water, but I'm a bit worried about matching salinity/alk since tank water and freshly mixed water are giving quite different results.

 

[brandon429]

Alk isn’t in the sand rinse thread though or any other param beyond salinity and temp

We did twenty thousand dollar sps tanks there using salinity and temp only

we do the light ramping part to make up for param differences

 

[Kaisentlaia]

Alk isn’t in the sand rinse thread though or any other param beyond salinity and temp

I'm a bit worried about alk because on the Kh Plus instructions they say that it's dangerous to raise dKh more than 1 degree in 24 hours: in this case I'd be raising it from 7.1 to 10.2 and if I add more salt to match salinity the final dKh would be even higher. That's a big spike.

we do the light ramping part to make up for param differences

I've read through most of the tank cleaning thread but I'm not familiar with the light ramping part. Would you be so kind to link a thread or post that explains it?

 

[brandon429]

It just means after the rip clean lower light intensity down about 40% and bring back up intensity over a weeks time

if the light can’t be lowered by a switch then you can raise it up off the tank to reduce intensity or place blockers in between light and reef to lower it, then remove them in sections.

 

[brandon429]

Drain off half your water while it’s clear then only use half new half old, that w help transition if concerned

the main thing you want gone is the sandbed waste, cyano, and all clogging from the rocks it’s ok to re use some old water

 

[Kaisentlaia]

It just means after the rip clean lower light intensity down about 40% and bring back up intensity over a weeks time

Thank you for the explanation! That sounds easy enough. I currently have two lights (white and blue) on separate timers and they aren't dimmable. I was running the white for 5+5 hours (with a 2h break in between) and the blue for 5+6 hours.

Now I'm doing 5+6 blue and 2+3 white to try and keep the algae at bay until I'll be able to to do the rip clean.

I could keep only the blue one for 5+6 hours and then slowly add the white back in one hour steps over a couple of weeks. Would that work?

the main thing you want gone is the sandbed waste, cyano, and all clogging from the rocks it’s ok to re use some old water

Perfect, I will reuse some of the old tank water then. Should be enough to avoid a big dKh spike.

 

[brandon429]

Good plan agreed

 

[Kaisentlaia]

The tank has been rip cleaned! First of all, a few before pics:

And after:

Quite the improvement isn't it? I was able to match temp and salinity almost perfectly (a bit lower than 1024 now probably because the sand was still wet with the RODI I used for the last rinse, but since I don't have a lid for this one evaporation will take care of it soon enough) while alk ended up being around 10.1 even if I reused some of the old water but hey, this means I won't have to struggle with keeping it up for a while now. Thankfully I was able to raise alk to 8.2 before the move so I hope this won't be too much of a shock.

I couldn't find the mantis shrimp, she had been behaving weirdly for almost a week and disappeared in the last couple of days. I suspect a molt gone wrong but she was quite old so could have been age too. Maybe she's hidden inside a rock, we'll see.

I was able to fish the pistol shrimp out of the old tank (and found a fresh molt too) but I lost track of him while moving rocks around so I hope he's ok. I'll cross my fingers and keep an eye out for digging.

I did the rock cleaning in a closed room (hubby and cats out) keeping a window open. I wore a mask, safety goggles and thick rubber gloves. Nevertheless I ended up with tingly fingers in the hand I was holding the rocks with and when I checked I noticed that the glove probably had the tiniest invisible hole because it was wet inside. Darn. I took a break, washed my hands really well and then got back to work wearing double gloves this time. I feel okay though so let's hope I won't end up sick.

When I started prepping for the rip cleaning my cat really wanted to help, as usual:

Now I'm exhausted but glad I did this, the tank looks amazing now. The amount of gunk that came out of the rocks was unbelievable, I threw out a big bucket of muddy water with a thick layer of mulm on the bottom. I ended up using a LOT of water, while I was cleaning the rocks I had to change it often because after some scrubbing I couldn't see through anymore.

I first scrubbed everything with a toothbrush and after that there was some serious scraping involved. Luckily I had some metal tools that were perfect for the job and allowed me to reach inside almost all the nooks and crannies. I tried to be as gentle as possible around the corals but man, they are mad at me now:

Only the sinularia isn't too phased by the move but it's attached to a tiny rock and I was able to move it by itself without disturbing it too much. The others were attached to the rocks so they had it worse. I hope they'll come around.

I think overall it took me 5 hours to break it down, clean everything and get everything back together in the new tank. Plus some time yesterday to get a couple of jugs of saltwater ready and prep everything I needed. I still have to clean up the mess in the room I used though, now that I let it air out for a bit. I used new sand rinsed a couple of times and I will throw away the old one, I can't muster the energy for rinsing that one too.

I will monitor nitrites and nitrates in the next days but hopefully I won't end up dealing with a mini cycle since the filter media hasn't been touched. Oh and I absolutely want a new light now, the old fixture is too long for the cube and looks kinda ugly on it.

 

[brandon429]

Hey I'm very very impressed

That's trip to the dentist clean. We would like to use your rip clean example for others to see if you like, I'll show your post to others considering the move. Very cleanly executed.