When to pull the trigger on full tank restart?

[Tyler White]

Straight up at what point in your experience have your reef tanks required a restart?
Pests? Algae? Dinos? Crash?
Let me know your experiences

 

[Dos Ocho]

2 major tank crashes for me.
#1: Dinos in my Biocube. Had the tank looking great for a year and a half. Dinos came in from another tank on some macroalgae. Within 3 weeks, thick brown snot everywhere. Tried to fight it for a couple months, decided to save the fish and pull the plug.
#2: Adverse reaction to Chemiclean in my 40 long, also running for a year and a half. Killed 90% of my corals and inverts in 48 hours. Decided to, again, save the fish and pull the plug.

Absolutely hated both experiences. But, comes with the territory....

 

[SantaMonica]

Rarely need to restart. Worst case is you medicate with copper by accident and need to replace the rocks. But even that can be slowly removed with enough export, and then re-coral the tank.

 

[Benga]

Mine didn't crash completely or anything but Ryan from the BRS said something about how important it is to have a tank that you can keep up with in terms of maintenance. So tore down my 40B which i was struggling to keep up with and did a 13g cube and going in with the knowledge i accumulated from the first tank plus new content from BRS. It's so much easier to care for it now.

 

[raketemensch]

Mine didn't crash completely or anything but Ryan from the BRS said something about how important it is to have a tank that you can keep up with in terms of maintenance. So tore down my 40B which i was struggling to keep up with and did a 13g cube and going in with the knowledge i accumulated from the first tank plus new content from BRS. It's so much easier to care for it now.

Interesting, since the leading theory is that more gallons of water means more stability.

Why do you find the smaller tank easier?

(Not challenging anything, if it comes across that way)

 

[Fishy212]

I had a 75 gallon mixed reef tank 2 years in. Mostly all softies , lps and a bunch of zoas. Then hurricane sandy happened. The whole entire area I lived in lost power for 2 weeks. I could not keep the generators going.

 

[Benga]

Interesting, since the leading theory is that more gallons of water means more stability.

Why do you find the smaller tank easier?

(Not challenging anything, if it comes across that way)

Yea that's what i thought too and while it may be it was hard for me just on the fact that i needed to do higher volume changes or more frequent and the balance of the two wasnt there for me in that 40B size. But it was more than that, I learned the importance of all the backoffice stuff like plumbing, filtration, skimmer tuning, sump design, substrate, rock type and most importantly automation.

All the stuff i learned from the brs guides made the 13g cube build a piece of cake tank to take care of. So while 40B may have more stability from chemical imbalances and stuff it didn't matter for me because i had bigger issues.

And most importantly patience, my previous tanks were all rushed because i was so excited but with the latest build i took my sweet time and planned everything out carefully.

 

[Rilo]

I haven't had a need to restart. The worst I've had to do is take out aiptasia infested rocks and spot treat the remaining rocks with F-Aiptasia. Then treat the take with fluconazole and completely remove the tank of sand and that's it.