What is the tank status now ? Just got my Red Sea 400 and reading this
Totally didn't even see which thread this was when I was replying to you yesterday, lol.
So I was fighting dinos as of my last post, I think. Added a UV filter and did a round of dinox which seemed to help. The coral I was worried about started coming back, my Xenia never did fully recover to their glory days though. Dosed my nitrates, got them up to acceptable levels and that made my soft coral super happy.
After all that, cyano started overtaking my sandbed, but it appeared that the dinos were either gone or on their way to gone. Started trying to fight cyano, did a round of chemiclean which just made my skimmer go nuts and then the tank started to smell because I wasn't emptying the skimmer every day. Chemiclean did nothing to the cyano, just kept taking over.
Started noticing my hard coral (favia and acan lords) dying off slowly. Xenia never had recovered. Everything else looked okay, zoas happy and all that.
Some life stuff happened, I got sick. Husband had to take care of the tank for a little while, he doesn't know much about it. Cyano just dominated the sandbed, snails dying. Did start getting some nice crystalline algae growing at long last. I started hating the tank. Super sensitive to smells and was really tired, and it was pretty noisy. I hadn't ever gotten around to replacing the skimmer or return pump to address the noise issues. I started avoiding my office like the plague. I hated one of my fish, the foxface, who was a greedy constantly-hungry ******* to everyone else in the tank. Tried to catch him to get him out with no luck. It was becoming a chore...having to ask my husband to feed them all the time and I couldn't do any water changes or top off.
After spending a few weeks hating the tank and avoiding my office, decided that I'd either have to hire someone to take care of it since I couldn't and I felt bad making my husband do it, or sell it. Decided to go with selling it. I had always wanted this tank and a big saltwater tank, but in the end, despite having tons of free time, this just wasn't the hobby for me. Too much work and it was making me unhappy. I don't think it was necessarily the problem solving aspect of a new tank...but it was more time consuming than I had hoped, for the return enjoyment. I knew what I was getting into but I guess I didn't know how I'd feel after months of doing it.
So yeah, as of now, I've sold off all of my livestock and I'm looking for a buyer for the tank. Lots of money down the drain, obviously, but as soon as the fish went to their new home, I felt nothing but relief. I would love to have a low maintenance tiny tank someday, but it'll probably be freshwater if I ever get into it again. I'll just have to admire saltwater tanks from afar
