FO tank maintenance..?

So, my work has found out that I have a sw tank at home and has asked me to take care of their FO tank in the office. They do not like the current company taking care of their tank and would rather pay me to take care of it. I am sure they are thinking they can save money with paying me to do it. But, I am going to call around and see how much local companies charge and then turn around and charge my office just a little less than them..



Anyway....They have an acrylic tank, custom made, about 100 gallons. There is a wet/dry underneath with bioballs and that is pretty much all they have for filtration. They have crushed coral substrate and ugly fake rocks. For fish, they have a hippo tang (which is HUGE and i told them they need to get rid of it because it is too large), spanish hogfish, 2 clowns, foxface lo, and clown trigger. Their porcupine puffer died in the care of the current company. Long story for that poor fish.

Besides WCs and testing the water and general maintenance, is there anything special I need to do to take care of the FO tank? The company has only been doing biweekly WCs.

Thanks guys/gals

 

Take out the bioballs.

 

I do plan on that, I HATE bioballs. I took them out of my wet/dry and have not regretted it one bit.

 

be careful not to scratch the acrylic! I would suggest removing the bio- balls and adding 10-15 pounds of LR(if space allows, Run some kind of GFO, Chemi-pure, Carbon. I have never had good luck with any kind of tank with out LR and when i started to run Chemi-pure alot of my problems went away.

 

I am going to make them buy a mag float made for acrylic. I didn't get a chance to really look at the wet/dry, but if the water trickles over the bioballs, I probably don't want to put any LR in there right?

and I ALWAYS run Chemipure Elite in my reef tank

 

Not really sure about that but my guess would be no. There is a spot under the egg crate the balls sit on tho and maybe you can put some there and raise the water level? and with the mag float make sure nothing its between the acrylic and mag float. i cant stress that enough because i had a nasty scratch in my old tank(and thats why i got rid of it and have the other old one set up that was FO) and chemi-pure is my fav product out there besides b-ionc

 

Yeah, that is one thing I am scared of, scratching the acrylic. Won't be pretty. LOL. I will have to look and see if that water trickles down or not.

 

Be careful removing the bioball w/o adequate replacement space for biological filtration. You could risk a cycle which could kill all the fish. I would start by adding some rock into the tank, either use pre-cured or dry rock that has been washed. After that is in, I would replace the bio-balls and perhaps add a refugium or put some macro algae somewhere. The undergravel filter is archaic, but there's not much you can do about it w/o tearing down the entire tank and redoing it.