Something is a little off in my reef. It's a softy dominated mixed reef which does make having thriving sps corals a little more difficult but they appear to be struggling more then normal lately. Water parameters are in line with the norm so while doing my weekly water change I decided to do a little extra cleaning. At home testing is not showing any issues so I figured I'd be a little proactive.
My display is bare bottom and I do weekly detritus siphons, but rarely touch the sump or the overflow. I am of the mindset that large detritus accumulations over years are bad but some accumulation over months is fine. I don't have nor will I ever have a spotless sump. My corner overflow is cleaned about annually give or take. I also occasionally remove some detritus from the sump.
That part of the story is not really interesting everyone should be doing some sort of cleaning at some point be it weekly, monthly, yearly or even every few years in really hard to get at spots. I was looking at the marinepure block and it really seemed to be clogged up. I keep it in a low flow area of the sump that used to be a fuge but I no longer grow macro algae since I have no issues with no3/p04. There certainly is some debate whether these ceramic blocks are good or not, they leach aluminum ect. A couple of years ago when I moved and had to keep my fish in a holding tank without proper filtration I do feel it helped. In the display I don't know. It's not doing anything bad so I see no reason to remove it.
Since my sump is so unpractical I had to remove the drain pipe (yay unions) but after getting it out and rising it with clear tank water I was really surprised. The water turned completely brown moving the block around a bit with my hand. I can only imagine if I actually rinsed this out thoroughly. The detritus inside the block is much finer then run of the mill bottom of the tank stuff. These pictures are after approximately 30 minutes of sitting. You can see the water from the sump is clear with everything settling to the bottom but the marine pure water is still super cloudy.
We'll see if this causes any improvement in the reef. It may not, but if I left this indefinitely it certainly would cause a problem one day. Maybe not for years but maybe soon.
My display is bare bottom and I do weekly detritus siphons, but rarely touch the sump or the overflow. I am of the mindset that large detritus accumulations over years are bad but some accumulation over months is fine. I don't have nor will I ever have a spotless sump. My corner overflow is cleaned about annually give or take. I also occasionally remove some detritus from the sump.
That part of the story is not really interesting everyone should be doing some sort of cleaning at some point be it weekly, monthly, yearly or even every few years in really hard to get at spots. I was looking at the marinepure block and it really seemed to be clogged up. I keep it in a low flow area of the sump that used to be a fuge but I no longer grow macro algae since I have no issues with no3/p04. There certainly is some debate whether these ceramic blocks are good or not, they leach aluminum ect. A couple of years ago when I moved and had to keep my fish in a holding tank without proper filtration I do feel it helped. In the display I don't know. It's not doing anything bad so I see no reason to remove it.
Since my sump is so unpractical I had to remove the drain pipe (yay unions) but after getting it out and rising it with clear tank water I was really surprised. The water turned completely brown moving the block around a bit with my hand. I can only imagine if I actually rinsed this out thoroughly. The detritus inside the block is much finer then run of the mill bottom of the tank stuff. These pictures are after approximately 30 minutes of sitting. You can see the water from the sump is clear with everything settling to the bottom but the marine pure water is still super cloudy.
We'll see if this causes any improvement in the reef. It may not, but if I left this indefinitely it certainly would cause a problem one day. Maybe not for years but maybe soon.
