My Tank crashed! :( after a year!

kenzo · Jul 21, 2015

Anyway, thank you guys for your feedback!

Cleo642 · Jul 21, 2015

Tap water is clean in new york? I remember David Letterman making jokes about how dirty the water in New York is.

Wolff92 · Jul 21, 2015

I've move many times and even combined two tanks: sand, rock, water etc. And never had a mini cycle. If I had to guess it was from not using rodi water and using tap water with Amquel. Products that make tap water safe often bind the heavy metals and other bad stuff and sink them down into the bottom of the tank and substrate where they remain and can build up over time. My guess is that when you removed the old sand and stirred up the tank before actually moving it you released these metals etc. In the the water column exposing them to corals. I could be wrong just my POV. Best of luck to you everyone can experience hardships in the hobby and while it sucks we are always learning and that's the great thing about it all.

twilliard · Jul 21, 2015

Triton water test will reveal the information needed to make an educated guess on the next step.
so much speculation on this thread, this test will give you definitive proof of what's going on

vladandlilith · Jul 21, 2015

This is not what I needed to see as I am moving about 800 miles next week and 6 large reef tanks. I'm expecting some losses, but I hope to keep it minimal.

kenzo · Jul 21, 2015

Wolff92 said:
I've move many times and even combined two tanks: sand, rock, water etc. And never had a mini cycle. If I had to guess it was from not using rodi water and using tap water with Amquel. Products that make tap water safe often bind the heavy metals and other bad stuff and sink them down into the bottom of the tank and substrate where they remain and can build up over time. My guess is that when you removed the old sand and stirred up the tank before actually moving it you released these metals etc. In the the water column exposing them to corals. I could be wrong just my POV. Best of luck to you everyone can experience hardships in the hobby and while it sucks we are always learning and that's the great thing about it all.

No I removed all the corals and fish before I took out the sand. Thank you

kenzo · Jul 21, 2015

vladandlilith said:
This is not what I needed to see as I am moving about 800 miles next week and 6 large reef tanks. I'm expecting some losses, but I hope to keep it minimal.

6 reef tanks and wow 800 miles that's a long journey and lot of work! Best of luck!

bobbychullo · Jul 21, 2015

kenzo said:
I never really tested my tap water, but I live in NY and they say tap water here is pretty clean. Anyway now I want to check it I had xenia in my tank and it never really grew that much and for 10/11 months that's all it grew from the frag I got. My sps corals grew faster than it.

i'm sure as clean as it can be, it's not clean enough. you want 0 TDS, especially with SPS. I doubt any tapwater is 0 TDS...

kenzo · Jul 22, 2015

bobbychullo said:
i'm sure as clean as it can be, it's not clean enough. you want 0 TDS, especially with SPS. I doubt any tapwater is 0 TDS...

I don't think it's 0 TDS and I only grew easy sps corals like monti cap, montipora digitata and birdsnest. May be that's why I never had a problem. May be if I had those expensive fancy sps corals there would have been lot of problems.

luke33 · Jul 22, 2015

kenzo said:
Phosphate is 0.25 ppm, ammonia is 0 ppm, nitrite is 0 ppm , pH is 8.2 , but nitrate level is little high 20 ppm

I could see your corals dying from the above but for fish to die that is pretty strange. The water conditioner is the thing that's causing your skimmer to go nuts. I would be concerned with the .25 phosphate as that is pretty deadly to most coral, especially sps. When you start getting over the .1 mark its getting up there. The RODI though is your biggest issue as you have no idea what your adding to your tank.

Chaz D · Jul 23, 2015

check that veggie mag, lots of reports on those crashing tanks.

Harold Green · Jul 23, 2015

The tap water could be the main source of your problems. I quit using tap water almost thirty years ago. RO filters are cheap compared to the problems of using tap water in your tank. You can probably get away with a move and replacing the sand bed as long as you don't have any fish or other animals in the tank but if you do then the rock may or may not be enough to keep ammonia and nitrates in check. Too late now but you could have placed the old sand bed in a separate container and flowed the new tank water through it until the new sand bed had gotten established.

SantaMonicaHelp · Jul 23, 2015

Oh no, that sucks

Your tank looked so beautiful, that's painful. Don't give up though, you will have at least an equally as beautiful tank again before you know it. Just hang in there. Good luck.

~SF

kenzo · Jul 24, 2015

Harold Green said:
The tap water could be the main source of your problems. I quit using tap water almost thirty years ago. RO filters are cheap compared to the problems of using tap water in your tank. You can probably get away with a move and replacing the sand bed as long as you don't have any fish or other animals in the tank but if you do then the rock may or may not be enough to keep ammonia and nitrates in check. Too late now but you could have placed the old sand bed in a separate container and flowed the new tank water through it until the new sand bed had gotten established.

I know I should have gotten some advice before moving my tank, but I was too busy moving and completely forgot. Anyway I'm thinking about buying a rodi filter before buying any corals again.

kenzo · Jul 24, 2015

SantaMonicaHelp said:
Oh no, that sucks Your tank looked so beautiful, that's painful. Don't give up though, you will have at least an equally as beautiful tank again before you know it. Just hang in there. Good luck.

~SF

Thnx..I know it looked so pretty

I'm going to slowly rebuild everything

kenzo · Jul 24, 2015

Chaz D said:
check that veggie mag, lots of reports on those crashing tanks.

No it was the moving that messed everything up and yeah I think I saw somewhere that veggie mag does that. I usually change them like every six months.

Breakthecycle2 · Jul 24, 2015

Im not bashing anyone. I've been bashed many times on many different forums. This place is to get advice and help on multiple things regarding this awesome hobby, HOWEVER, you can't tell me all the research and members available on here, you didn't know tap water could be a problem, specifically if you are just "guessing" its "clean". My tap water here reads .10 on my TDS meter, yes I still WON'T use it. I see so many people (not OP) go the cheap route in this hobby only to cost 10x the $ later on, including me when I first started. I have invested enough money to put a down payment on second house.....the full 20% (homes here start around $400K) because I know later on, Im going to do it anyway. My point is, do it right the first time. Who knows, maybe the tap water didn't contribute to your issues, but my guess is, it's at least part of it.

kenzo · Jul 25, 2015

Breakthecycle2 said:
Im not bashing anyone. I've been bashed many times on many different forums. This place is to get advice and help on multiple things regarding this awesome hobby, HOWEVER, you can't tell me all the research and members available on here, you didn't know tap water could be a problem, specifically if you are just "guessing" its "clean". My tap water here reads .10 on my TDS meter, yes I still WON'T use it. I see so many people (not OP) go the cheap route in this hobby only to cost 10x the $ later on, including me when I first started. I have invested enough money to put a down payment on second house.....the full 20% (homes here start around $400K) because I know later on, Im going to do it anyway. My point is, do it right the first time. Who knows, maybe the tap water didn't contribute to your issues, but my guess is, it's at least part of it.

Yes thank you for your feedback. I learned my lesson the hard way. Yes before I only did like a 10% water change every week and it didn't really affect my tank that much. But I used tap water to fill my whole tank. Anyway as I mentioned before here on this thread I'm thinking about buying a rodi unit before I buying new corals.

richard.oberholzer.923 · Jul 25, 2015

It took me 72 hours to fill my 800L tank with RODI and it was all worth it. I almost filled it with conditiond tap water, a lot faster. I am so glad I did after reading this. This hobby has tough me patience . BUY THE RODI IT'S WORTH IT! !!!!!!
Good luck with the tank☺

Elton20 · Jul 26, 2015

I'm a little late to this but what happened was you released anaerobic bacteria when you stirred up the sand. Did you start sucking sand out before or after you removed the water? I read someone's post that a lot of their animals died when switching to BB and it was probably because you released anaerobic bacteria from stirring up the sand before you removed the water. I removed my sand a few months ago too but to keep the bacteria from killing everything I pulled all the water out until it was about 1/4" deep, removed fish, corals, rocks, then sand. Note that my corals were exposed to air for a few minutes and then I scrubbed my rocks with the old water, as soon as the water became putrid I scrubbed with more old water and then finally rinsed the rock with new water. Not a single animal died and everything was fine. Anaerobic bacteria depletes the water of oxygen when it's released into the water column, so I was told, not actually sure if that's true. This is why I switched to BB, no more sand for me, just not worth it