I recently adopted a similar damselfish from a fellow reefer and I like his color and personality. But, I completely forgot how they loved to dig! So, I was in a losing battle with brown cyano (or diatoms) for the past few weeks. My tank has a secret mistake, the sandbed is too shallow to be a DSB but deep enough to have some anoxic spots and is quite difficult to vacuum. I only vacuum the top layer out and I know there's a ton of poop just underneath from the "dust" I see after disturbing it. It would have been cool to do a thorough vacuum with the vacuum output to a filter sock on the sump, but I have no sump.
So, this weekend I went with the next best option. Completely rinse out my sandbed. >:] This was how I kept reef tanks when I was a teen, before the internet (mostly just fowlr though) but it's my first time to completely rinse out substrate with an established setup. Plus, I Novus'ed my acrylic tank in the process.
on-purpose blurry before-shot of the mess.
Started using my old resun sk-05 skimmer to help. It's ugly, but it works and unfortunately it's grown on me so I think I'll keep it. This is a week's worth of skimmate.
Placed the rocks and LS in a bucket.
After scooping out most of the sand.
Tank cleaned and Novus'ed
I will post after-shots once the leather opens up.
So far everything is going well. I rinsed the sand with tap water and I'm pretty sure half of its mass was detritus. Then, I added half of the rinsed sand back and put the rocks and LS and most of the old water back and added seachem prime to neutralize any chlorine from the tap. I also kept the sponge and didn't rinse out the bio media (denitrate) in my HOB filter to keep the bacteria.
