Deep cleaning a nano tank

boomeraudio · Jul 2, 2021

Hey @Nick Steele - couple of questions on this. I'm at the point where all my coral has basically died.

I cannot even keep GSP alive. Seems to make no sense at all and is very frustrating. so I'm going to do a full reboot of the tank.

I'm concerned with keeping what few coral I do have and my two clownfish alive so I have a couple of questions.

1) Am I removing all of the sand during this and rinsing it or just removing it completely?

2) Do I use the water I removed and just do a 50% water change? I'm not sure how much to keep/remove.

3) Because there's not much left to lose, I really do want to keep my fish alive. Do I need a bottle of turbo start or dr. tim's again because the tank will re-cycle itself?

4) Should I turn off and remove the UV sterilizer?

Any other advice would be awesome and much appreciated. Thank you for your help.

brandon429 · Jul 2, 2021

Uv doesn’t matter yay or nay never matters. Using uv during the initial cycle will specifically not stop the cycle though forums would say it would. Nothing stops a cycle, there isn’t an example of a stopped cycle on the Internet other than for api and red sea/ no tan conversion reports. Uv is great at clearing suspended organisms from the water though, run it if you have one.

adding more bottle bac after cycle never makes a difference, toss it out is better

yes you’d want to rip clean vs partial clean, partial cleaning upwells waste and can cause more loss

boomeraudio · Jul 2, 2021

brandon429 said:
Uv doesn’t matter yay or nay never matters. Using uv during the initial cycle will specifically not stop the cycle though forums would say it would. Nothing stops a cycle, there isn’t an example of a stopped cycle on the Internet other than for api and red sea/ no tan conversion reports. Uv is great at clearing suspended organisms from the water though, run it if you have one.

adding more bottle bac after cycle never makes a difference, toss it out is better

yes you’d want to rip clean vs partial clean, partial cleaning upwells waste and can cause more loss

Is there EXACT step by step on a rip clean. I have done a lot of reading but haven't seemed to find an easily laid out step by step process.

Nick Steele · Jul 2, 2021

boomeraudio said:
I'm concerned with keeping what few coral I do have and my two clownfish alive so I have a couple of questions.

1) Am I removing all of the sand during this and rinsing it or just removing it completely? I removed and tossed all my sand but that was because I had a bad batch of salt that had very high alk and I wanted to try out bare bottom. It’s perfectly fine to just remove the whole sand bed and rinse it till it’s clear and clean.

2) Do I use the water I removed and just do a 50% water change? I'm not sure how much to keep/remove. A rip clean is a 100% water change. I drained first 3-4 gal of my tank into two 5 gal buckets to store corals/inverts and fish in during the clean.

3) Because there's not much left to lose, I really do want to keep my fish alive. Do I need a bottle of turbo start or dr. tim's again because the tank will re-cycle itself? As long as you keep your rock you won’t go through a cycle at all. A peroxide clean is all that you need to do to the rocks to clean them and it won’t harm bacteria.

4) Should I turn off and remove the UV sterilizer? I left my uv off but as stated above not an issue if left on.

Any other advice would be awesome and much appreciated. Thank you for your help.

Answers are in bold

Nick Steele · Jul 2, 2021

@boomeraudio

I placed my rock in the shower on a Rubbermaid lid and just made sure to mist rocks and corals every 5 mins or so (with salt water of course). I peroxided cleaned a few bad spots but not my whole rock.

While I didn’t use a heater in either the fish or coral/invert bucket temp did get down to 74F but nothing seemed to mind it for the 6 hours or so it took. But if I did it again I might use a heater in at least the coral/invert bucket.

One tip is make sure you have plenty of saltwater mixed for this. I had 30G on hand and used 25ish gallons.