You have enough live rock to carry any bioload it currently has, the sand is in excess. I still like the look of sand in my tank so I always put some back, agreed, pre rinse it no matter what you get. Rinsed pure, then put it in back around the cleaned rocks... however we dislodged the detritus from their pores is fine by me but we use saltwater there so that live rock benthic animals are rinsed only in saltwater, the live rock is the filter not the sand, which is why you’re free to replace it all with rinsed sand, all at once. Working in increments is more dangerous than just doing it, strange but that’s how the thread works. We’d so enjoy seeing your documented work
* you have a dual purpose deep clean here and I’ll say why: in the nuisance algae forum, the big linked dinos thread up top, best I know of, they actually don’t get a lot of entrants willing to just clean/force the tank clean, they work mainly by altering nitrate and phosphate levels to target goals, ceasing water changes, and adding competing organisms, it’s fair to say they’re opposite of how I work but this is good science for both to see. Both methods want to simply know what it takes to beat dinos, so once we see how the initial cleaning does then both sides can factor the physical element into the mix, upon re looking at that pic it does look like confirmed dinos and they’ll know better in that other thread as well.
The neat part of rip cleaning is it’s applicable to any tank without harm, whether or not it stops a target in one pass is a pure luxury to strive for. It usually does
If it doesn’t, then you’ll wind up with a rip cleaned cloudless perfection tank that has dinos, and with that clean palette any number of N and P adjustments can still be undertaken. If you are willing to clean detritus and be mindful of it upon reassembling the tank, then you can rip clean the aquarium six thousand times, as I have my reefbowl, and it will get better not worse. Few invaders beat our rip cleaning, the thread shows. If yours does, then in the dinos thread they’ll be interested to see the strain and amounts/re amassing rates from this type who can beat a full rip cleaning, you’ll be dealing with a very strong species they’ll enjoy trying to compete out. Done right, a rip cleaning doesn’t hurt an invaded tank nor a perfectly fine tank.
The last three times I took my own 13 yr old nano reef apart in that thread there was nothing wrong with it, I sat the whole system out in the air for a half an hour, but in all my plannings we used holding water
I’m willing to do this to my own reef upon demand, I’d get up and tap rinse my own sandbed right now in the worlds most delicate pico reef lol rip cleans aren’t scary.
*no full production lighting the next day, ramp up, cloudy week simulation
The mega clean reef is more reflective in every direction, lower those whites as that’s the coral stress and not the cleaning event. Ramp back up to full production slowly pls take pics as others want to see. This is reef tank surgery, big deal. it’s the new way of arresting invaders relative to the size of the aquarium and not any other factors. If someone has a nano, then they have a fully accessible aquarium and if the theory holds correctly no invader can beat creative human access and direct war. If you can access an invader, you can beat it without knowing it’s species and you can beat it without measuring or altering the tanks parameters, the parameters that currently grow coral just fine. You have a great chance with this method whether it’s dinos or cyano either way.
B
