SUPER busy weekend maintenance. Wow. So much done.
First, I have to admit I am not good with regular maintenance. In fact, I am a LAR. But things had really gone too far.
So testing parameters was the first thing to do. Alk has been running a bit high lately - 9.8. But this jived with my Jim Welsh prototype system (aka AMI) so all is good there. Just need to turn down the dosing a bit. The phosphate on the Hanna ULR checker came in at .06 so all fine there for me. The Red Sea low range Nitrate test was another story - it goes to 4ppm and I have never exceeded that in the last 18 months. It was dark purple. Uh oh. Went the the NYOS test and it showed somewhere between 12 and 25ppm. Not good. What is going on?
Downstairs I went. First chore was to change out the two canisters of carbon that barely had water trickling out of it. I dumped them out and soaked them in citric acid for a few hours to clean them all out. Then, I refilled with ROX carbon from BRS and reinstalled. The PMUP on this dual reactor is still going strong despite tons of crap growing on it. The first one I was not so lucky with - some kind of stomatella crawled up into it an seized it - but this one has been running for almost a year now.
Next I went to the Denitrator and took a look. Hmm, DOS was still spinning every once and a while. What is this... there are bubbles in the output but not the input. Hmm. I took the to output tube off and let it run. Almost nothing. So, the pump head was shot. Shouldn't have been a surprised, the ORP probes pH value (see previous posts if this confuses you) was showing 11.2-11.6 for at least a month. Oops. Then I looked into the reactor chamber and there was green stringy things on the crushed coral on the top. ugh. So I snapped on a new DOS head and fired up the pump using my Calcium Reactor profile so I could clear some tank water through it and clean it out. Immediately you could smell the rotten egg smell of sulphur dioxide. But, after a couple of liters it was coming out nice and clean and no smell. "pH" dropped to 6.2 and then began to rise back up. Set the "dosing" back to 20,000ml and watched it climb back up over the weekend into the low 11 so I just now moved up the dosing to 60000ml and try and get it to settle in around 10-10.5.
Now on to the next chore. The skimmer. I have NEVER cleaned the skimmer since I put it in the tank. But until recently it had not become that dirty. However recently I had to put a bunch of Acans and my Scoly down in the sump since the stupid Heniochus I put in the display thought they were all pretty tasty. This meant I had to put a Kessil light over them and then came the coraline and other algae inside the skimmer. To clean it I filled a tote with old saltwater I had and then added about a cup of citric acid powder. I let that run for about five hours and then brushed all the algae away. I also disassembled every single piece and cleaned it - including the pump itself. Once reassembled, there was a noticeable difference in the output in terms of bubbles generated and moving up the stack.
I also turned on the RODI in my saltwater mixing tank to get ready for my first water change in six months. I think I am going to go back to more frequent water changes for a while at least to make sure to boost back up some of the trace elements even though I am running Triton.
I will report back soon to see how the nitrates do - if they reduce down in a week or so.
