from the example thread, wanted to review some ways people mess up rip cleans vs the ways they win at them:
#1 is under rinsing sand. we're all trained by bottle bac sellers to fear bacterial loss, it's not true.
whichever sand you use gets tap rinsed for hours on end, hours, because we don't have a better way yet that constitutes clear work threads like we can see by searching out rip cleans. Tap water is limitless, I've seen folks try and rinse out sand using RO water or Saltwater, they run out early, and input unrinsed cloudy sand into the new tank we want completely clean/cloudless. don't fear bacteria loss. rinse sand for hours in tap, verify it in a clear glass cup of water as cloudless, no spood stirring clouds up the glass, then do a final rinse in saltwater to evacuate that tap water and the huge lump of sand is ready to install in the new tank.
cover fish if they're held in totes while the tank is disassembled, we've had some fish jump out.
-scrape the inside of the tank clean with a razor or a rag with vinegar once you get the tank down to bare glass. I had folks do a great job on sand rinsing, but as they were lifting sand up with a small dust scoop they were dragging it up the walls of the tank (a scratch risk too) leaving trails of dried mud sand on the walls of the tank. they put back clean sand, clean rocks, then filled up to a muddy haze due to stuff stuck to the inside of the aquarium upon refill. be cloudless
rocks are never rinsed in tap water, those are the bacteria we're preserving. when they sit on the counter in air as you surgically detail them, that isn't harmful at all. rinse off your scraping by pouring saltwater over them, or set the scraped rocks in a 5 gallon bucket of clean saltwater/drawn off tank water from the takedown/ and twist-swish them roughly to caste off waste then they can be put back into the main new tank after the peroxide step.
don't forget to re ramp your lights. the same intensity that you've worked up to is the current tank's maximum PAR and it can burn corals on the totally clean tank. that light power likely factors heavily too in the algae growth. starting with a 40% light power cut, low whites and heavy blues, prevents bleaching and slows growback. I wouldnt get back to your original light intensity for about 3 months, try the lower means a while/corals still grow fine if they're being fed well, they don't need ultra high PAR we read about on these tanks of the month setups.
have your new tanks water set to match temp and salinity of the old tank. it's best to use all new water but if you need to save cash, you can take some of the current tank water and drain it off for reuse in the new setup system.
the reason the new tank does not cycle or mini cycle is because rock bacteria are all we need in any reef display, the sandbed bacteria were extra loading that your tank appreciates being gone, for a while, till they build up again slowly/this is what sandbeds do they store up waste.
you even have the option of not putting sand back at all, or waiting a while to put it back as it sits as a drying rinsed lump of cloudless perfection. for really bad invasion jobs it's nice not to have sand present until you get the rocks back into compliance. adding totally rinsed sand back to a running reef is not harmful, the grains fall down like snowglobe grains.
I've read that alot on r2r as well but that's how I did it before ever posting on this site. He's probably right but actually doing work can change from planning. I just turned off all flow. Scrubbed gently but enough to dislodge and chased all bits with siphon to be removed. Did it spread it? Perhaps, but I was aggressive and didn't wait for it to come back stronger. A series of this action works imo. Good luck!
