What is wrong with my tank??

[Chris_Noles]

Cancelled the order for chemiclean, I’m going to do the RIP clean for my tank. Just looking at my tank rn makes me mad for how bad it looks

 

[Chris_Noles]

I know my way has increased jerk mode factor but that’s on purpose lol

I really really want to rip clean Chris‘ tank live time here

everyone here had nine pages to earn a fix. Time to fix


if we can agree on that I’ll go edit my jmode above with the steps Shadow k just used to get there with a 20 tank in a few hours work

That would be great, I’m done screwing around I need to take action now with this

 

[Chris_Noles]

Could silica in my RO water be causing all of this?

 

[brandon429]

Let me go edit out my posts earlier brb. It will help many to see a dinos job fixed by sheer force

 

[brandon429]

ok all set
Uncaption me above and the unhelpful version just vaporizes away heh.



you’ll need twenty gallons of new water and some ro water for final rinses, we won’t use any bottled bac. Instead of posting a huge scroll example we can custom run your tank on its own.


what we are doing is complete disassembly cleaning all at once, none of it causes a cycle. it removes the most invasion, all efforts thereafter are aimed at preventing remassing, but the tank will reappear laser clean.


you first want all your fish and corals in holding buckets with good aeration and covers in clean made water, matching temp and salinity to current water. Anticipate jumpers in holding buckets. Don’t transfer dinos stuck to corals rinse them well before placed into holding.

the rocks are then lifted out

rinse off rocks in RO water for this particular job. Dinos hate osmotic stress and quick simple ro won’t uncycle rocks. Rub off all dinos using ro water and then final rinse in saltwater
rocks are now cloudless and ready and still cycled, no bottle bac.


take apart rest of tank and clean tank empty with cleaner of your choice

either get new sand and pre rinse for over an hour in prep, or rinse your current sand in tap water in a bucket for over an hour, make it cloudless / most important step of all is the tap rinse and final sand rinse in ro you now have cloudless sand and rocks to reassemble in all new tank water matching temp and salinity to the old.


it skip cycles because 1. No clouding was allowed and 2. The rocks weren’t treated with antibiotics, they were merely rained on a sec then put back in the ocean. Bioslicks insulated them fully.



some dinos will automatically ride back in on the slime coat vectors of fish but for once they’ll have zero community support and thats when we’d begin the common dinos suppression set of moves, the ones the masses try to employ in the full invaded condition.

 

[Chris_Noles]

Let me go edit out my posts earlier brb. It will help many to see a dinos job fixed by sheer force

I got cyano too and I assume the RIP clean will get rid of that also

 

[Chris_Noles]

ok all set
Uncaption me above and the unhelpful operant conditioning vaporizes away heh.



you’ll need twenty gallons of new water and some ro water for final rinses, we won’t use any bottled bac. Instead of posting a huge scroll example we can custom run your tank on its own.


what we are doing is complete disassembly cleaning all at once, none of it causes a cycle. it removes the most invasion, all efforts thereafter are aimed at preventing remassing, but the tank will reappear laser clean.


you first want all your fish and corals in holding buckets with good aeration and covers in clean made water, matching temp and salinity to current water. Anticipate jumpers in holding buckets. Don’t transfer dinos stuck to corals rinse them well before placed into holding.

the rocks are then lifted out

rinse off rocks in RO water for this particular job. Dinos hate osmotic stress and quick simple ro won’t uncycle rocks. Rub off all dinos using ro water and then final rinse in saltwater
rocks are now cloudless and ready and still cycled, no bottle bac.


take apart rest of tank and clean tank empty with cleaner of your choice

either get new sand and pre rinse for over an hour in prep, or rinse your current sand in tap water in a bucket for over an hour, make it cloudless / most important step of all is the tap rinse and final sand rinse in ro you now have cloudless sand and rocks to reassemble in all new tank water matching temp and salinity to the old.


it skip cycles because 1. No clouding was allowed and 2. The rocks weren’t treated with antibiotics, they were merely rained on a sec then put back in the ocean. Bioslicks insulated them fully.



some dinos will automatically ride back in on the slime coat vectors of fish but for once they’ll have zero community support and thats when we’d begin the common dinos suppression set of moves, the ones the masses try to employ in the full invaded condition.

Okay so if I understand correctly basically all I’m doing is clean (and scrubbing?) my rocks and cleaning the sand? And I can do this all in one take right? No waiting?

 

[Aqua Man]

I got cyano too and I assume the RIP clean will get rid of that also

Yes. I did this on my tank a few months ago. I chose to replace my sand. Cyano was bad and I wanted a coarser sand.

A couple months later…

Now I can enjoy my tank again!!!

 

[Aqua Man]

And I can do this all in one take right? No waiting?

Yup, took me about 4 hrs. Have everything ready before you start.

 

[ying yang]

Bet bottled bacteria makers/ sellers love reading brandons posts of use no bottle bac at all ha ha
Can imagine them in there board rooms with graph of expected sales for next year.
1 graph showing where expected sales was before brandons posts.
2nd graph showing new lower predicted sales ha ha love it.
But honesty goes a long way and if something isnt needed then it just isnt needed.

 

[Chris_Noles]

Yup, took me about 4 hrs. Have everything ready before you start.

Sounds good I definitely need to figure out the logistics of how I am going to get enough RO water to fill up my tank again.

 

[brandon429]

agreed no quick action required/its planning phase. agreed it takes all new heated, circulated ready mixed saltwater for the tank


then separate holding water for the disassembly buckets because those will have highest concentration of dinos cells sloughed, new tank water is separate from the holding water and all new. rinse off items when transferring from holding buckets to the final assembly.

and the tap rinsing the sand, it usually takes more than one hour look at these rinse details from Shadow, and Aqua's disassembly pic above is also spot on disassembly + cleaning 100%

Shadow_k:

tank cleaned out and rinsed with RODI water

Now I tackled the sand this is My sand after 1 rinse

rinse number 75 and yes I counted haha

Final sand rinse in ro

immediately after rip clean:

two weeks sustain

the rocks are rinsed rather briefly and perhaps brushed off in the initial ro rinse as the main mass remover of dinos off the rocks, once removed from the tank for cleaning and holding.

in non dinos tanks we rinse rocks in saltwater but here we want to shock the dinos cells adhered to surfaces

then wash them off last in saltwater, back into saltwater for holding as cleaned rocks...to be set on 100% pre rinsed sand, final rinse in RO, and the tank will sparkle like a gem.

there will be expected light growback we can fight in easier ways, it'll be 1% battles on the toughest scourge in reefing. you have what many folks consider to be the toughest invasion, this really tilts control in your favor and future cleanings never bring up old waste or invasion cells once rip cleaned.

the invasion you have can happen to anyone where that group of cells gets in, it’s not a problem with any parameter it’s merely luck vs unluck for all of us. If that group of cells get in, any of us would be challenged.

 

[Chris_Noles]

Just so I know am I scrubbing the rocks or just rinsing them off. Also after I do this do I just put them in clean saltwater? And will rinsing the sand with tap water cause issues?

 

[brandon429]

regarding tap rinse study this thread an hour or so before running the rip clean, this is about three hundred rip cleans all ran the same way. I did expect some follow up on the sandbed rinse portion its good to verify that tapwater causes no harm.


tap rinsing is the single strangest move in all of reefing agreed

Official Sand Rinse and Tank Transfer thread

If you are reading this thread to cure a tank invasion from a link I sent you, we do not need to identify your type of invasion here we do not need you to test anything at anytime regarding nitrate, phosphate etc Above all, we do not need to see a microscope slide picture of your invasion at...

www.reef2reef.com

agreed on rocks, they're brushed off first, then dip in RO water as they're getting cleaner, and final move store them in saltwater until ready for transfer into the new tank.

his final tank pics show the tap rinsing to be awesome v harmful

no bottle bac is used, no Prime water conditioner, no api testing is used. we just run the same method on every tank, no matter the reason why. half the entrants there did rip cleans on perfectly good tanks, just to move homes without a recycle.

 

[brandon429]

consider how he rinsed 75 times above, that’s stand out. It takes that much work because he’s blasting out 110% of all clouding components from the sand, leaving in clouding by under rinsing is the risk. Saltwater runs out too fast, we can’t rinse 75 times but tap water is endless


final rinse in ro, it’s like the tap was never used

 

[Chris_Noles]

consider how he rinsed 75 times above, that’s stand out. It takes that much work because he’s blasting out 110% of all clouding components from the sand, leaving in clouding by under rinsing is the risk. Saltwater runs out too fast, we can’t rinse 75 times but tap water is endless


final rinse in ro, it’s like the tap was never used

Okay so I am rinsing off the rocks with RO and scrubbing them too, do I dip them back into a designated bucket of RO for the rock scrubbing or do I just pour the RO on the rocks while scrubbing then dip them into saltwater AND then put them in a holding bucket of saltwater?

 

[Chris_Noles]

consider how he rinsed 75 times above, that’s stand out. It takes that much work because he’s blasting out 110% of all clouding components from the sand, leaving in clouding by under rinsing is the risk. Saltwater runs out too fast, we can’t rinse 75 times but tap water is endless


final rinse in ro, it’s like the tap was never used

Also as for the sand, do I completely remove all water out of my tank then take the sand out or how does that work?

 

[brandon429]

yes after the animals removed and held in clean water, you're lifting out rocks and rinsing + rubbing them off however you like/saltwater first or RO doesnt matter. rub em clean, then saltwater at the end and then hold em in clean saltwater for final addition into the main tank.


as you rinse rocks it goes down the drain, not into the holding water

each succession of holding is continually cleaner than the last

as long as some element of the application was RO on the rocks that'll shock any missed dinos nicely, while not being particularly harmful to bacteria like chlorine water might be, if sustained long enough.

RO is pretty harmless as a rock rinse when there's no attached corals, its mainly target we want rinsed off.


this now leaves only the main tank and its sand + muddy water, take it all apart like above so the tank is 100% clean glass cleaned and empty, sand is scraped into a bucket or something to rinse with. rinse outside is recommend, that ejection stuff clogs drains.

I used a plastic dustpan to shovel up old sand once in a big tank cleaning run. tap water rinse the sand for over an hour, total clean, test a handful by putting in a glass cup of water in clear light, shake it around to see if stays clear.

final sand rinse in ro, set it all back up in new water matching temp and salinity and it'll be total cloudless skip cycle rebuild carrying all your bioload even though we just blasted all the sandbed bacteria out. the rocks carry enough into the new build.

 

[brandon429]

as a loose count of gallons you'll need twenty gallons or so of new/circulated and heated water to go into the glass clean tank


then a few gallons for each holding bucket, clean new sw


then a few gallons of distilled or RO for the various final rinses.

 

[Chris_Noles]

Couple more questions should I have a designated bucket of RO water to scrub the rocks and dunk them in there or how does that work? Also what do I do if I have some coral encrusting on my rocks? @brandon429