the sickest trick for ridding live rock of detritus is to simply fill up a paint bucket w nice clean sw, stick a single rock in and do the twist hard and fast, working that rock among the water. Then let it sit an hour in that bucket, repeat as some will come from the inside animals as the outer portions were dislodged. the ocean rids it LR better than we do; good idea to swish clean older rocks any time you like you can't hardly do it wrong just use normal clean sw. Mine really don't have to be swished due to 2 reasons: old lr grown with heavy coralline gets its surface area smoothed out and retains less than early porous LR and 2. my system has always had flushing water changes, not normal ones. There are times where I feed so heavy I have to do four back to back 100% changes just to export the waste out of the system (pico reefers coral steroids trick)
it never built up detritus to begin with.
but the point is, only detritus can hurt a system, something that clouds. If you have a cloudless system, do what you want with it.
we can rip clean the tank for practice if you want, building that trust in your tank is major we can see in the thread. People w be hesitant to fix anything, so early cleaning before you are packed with coral is ideal
if you want to do it we'll add you to the last page too. if not, that tank is ok as - is though a run through bed replacement sure might help those final reds if you don't like em. try more blues less white light first round since that's so easy. if after a week of that the red stuff doesn't get better, can clean np and force it out.
*disclaimer for detritus lovers out there (we have some pros who run DSB's very old undisturbed and others have sumps full of it... which will cloud upon disturbance=detritus, but it has nutritional value too and some are using that by design I guess) and they wouldn't rinse their sink traps for a million bucks. that is a valid approach, in that case do not rinse. my method here is simply how to access a tank to force it to run clean, should someone want to do that. I sure do. The only thing allowed in my system is coral and purple coralline all else is forced out. vermetids too, they do not listen to me they remain as they please we deal
