wish me luck - (semi)emergency tear down

Well, my tank has been in a slow decline for the better part of this year, finally realized my sand bed was hard as a rock over most of it, and I think this is part of the problem....I'd had enough, no external aid helped. biopellets, chemicals, water changes... nothing.

So I came in today, drained as much water as I could into buckets and tubs (about 40 gallons of a 65 gallon system)

pulled everything out.... nuked the overflow and tank walls with h2o2, rinsed..

replaced the sand, put in the old stuff, topped off with new (aged 12+ hours) water....

tank is cloudy, every coral looks half dead or completely dead.

the fish are in hiding.

I found 2 living snails and an emerald crab...

So wish me luck. I am pretty sure everything was already dead before this, so I am just going to take it a day at a time and see if anything can recover. If it doesn't I am ditching corals for a while, going to go with a FOWLR system and get something interesting that isn't reef safe...


*gulp*

-Doug

 

Keep your head up and don't give up. Hope everything works out.

 

Good luck!!

 

Good luck. Keep us updated...

 

Why causes the sand to get like that, do you know?

 

Good luck Greysoul. i worry about my sandbed sometimes too. Did you have anything that stirred the sand such as nassarius snails or sand sifting goby?

 

So the water is clear, my duncan survived, some GSP, and maybe some rics... everything else is dead

Oh, the fish lived. I think Clownfish can survive in tomato soup tho, so that's not saying much.

As far as I can tell the sand compacts then there's a chemical reaction between the co2 dissolved in the water and the carbonate in the sand, it basically forms a concrete style bond... it breaks up easily, but it came up in big chunks at first, till it started to break back down.

This all started when I noticed my CuC was dieing off. It started with the loss of a tiger tail cuke and then the sand sifter star... then my turbo snails died, and all my smaller snails started to die... this process took about 6 months. Then my clam died, and I started getting s really bad GHA outbreak. Water changes, water tests, bio pellets, the works - nothing seemed to be stopping it.

I considered doing a 100% water change, last resort style... but decided that 50% and a tear down would be better, since I'd get less cycle and hopefully more stuff would survive, plus it would give me a chance to swap the sand bed and clean the GHA off the rocks.

I drained the tank, doused it liberaly with Hydrogen peroxide, rinsed it well, and waited...

I'm not happy, but I'm not giving up hope. There's still tissue on the frogspawn, the hydnophora (sp?) is bleached but still plump...

Lost my big acan, tons of zoas (thousands of polyps)... one acro looks stunned, but might pull through it. The other is gone...

I figure in 6 months it will start to look good again :\

Thanks for the well sishing, I'll keep this thread updated as I feel a need.

-Doug

 

Good luck, I know how mad it sucks, but it may end up coming out even better this time!