Old tank syndrome is vanquished in reefing now

[brandon429]

I personally think you're sitting on rose fertilizer gold. sein it through a filter towel, get the salt out, concentrate that in fresh ro water set to the correct hardness for the strain, and win Las Vegas' best in show rose competition using reef mud. I think it's plant nutrient gold considering the work it makes us have to do here.

 

[Tamberav]

that is indistinguishable from a vanilla frap at the ritzy coffee place

Might taste slightly different...

 

[brandon429]

New example coming soon, work in progress from private messaging

 

[brandon429]

I think David100 has done one of the most thorough, hardest working rip cleans I’ve seen. Proud to watch him force compliance in a decent sized reef, not an easy job

start:

years of aging are turned around in these specialized steps:

this was a rare time we did not do all the rocks and sand in the tank on the same day

we staggered the job- rocks externally worked about 90% by themselves first, set back on top of uncleaned sand for an extra couple weeks when an absolutely huge rip clean job all at once could be ran, correctly, with no rush. 100% all new water matching temp and salinity was attained

we couldn’t do all the rocks as thorough + the sand in one day, it would be 36 hours straight work

the rocks were cleaned in repeat jobs from start / bulk removal to endpoint micro fine knife point detailing, look how algae abutting the large toadstool coral was detailed clean exactly like reef dentistry, exacting

no bottle bac, no testing rip clean skip cycle enacted



the tank mid cleaning, where rocks were majorly removed and detailed about 75% of the way, put back, then re accessed a few days later gaining to fully detailed clean:

he built a holding tote of a deep cleaned rock for the filter base, heat and circulation:

he rinsed sand to true cloudlessness

and verified it was clean, in a test cup of water for each rinsed section, before putting back in the main tank


he took the main tank to the grass and washed it out, 100% of glass accumulations razor scraped then washed off so the tank looked clean


multiple days of dedicated cleaning were enacted but we did it all in a two week span / large tank old tank syndrome reversed

hes not going to get dinos now, or cyano…

for this final result

look at how eutrophic reefs are yellow, green, bright reflective palettes of color

look how oligotrophic reefs are muted, contrasting tones of blue and red and deep purple and black, modeled like the abyssal shelf reef what an amazing turnaround


******look at this degree of waste that would be left in the tank had he opted for fluconazole or other kill methods that degrade the algae in the tank

there was already the waste from years running, plus it would have taken on degraded algae waste, full surgical evacuation was key and required


the surface area is restored, the plugging growths no longer cover the live rock

the live rock crevices now see wastewater and nitrification rates are restored, the live rocks can now express waste vs have it pent up

he is free to use fluconazole now, as a preventative not the remover -if- required

he’s willing to do a few simple guiding runs of rocks outside the tank, they can be lifted out easily, before resorting to medicines

in some reef dentistry runs more than one cleaning visit is needed

the system will take on a new life trophic state since mass was evacuated by force vs hands off guiding

his topoff water can now be verified perfectly clean zero tds

Identification of his invader did not matter: any mass of that degree would best be handled by surgery and not internal degradation of the offending mass

allelopathic plant / cellular compounds and irritants are now fully gone, the reef will start to regenerate hermatypic corals and look at the quality of coralline and pigmentation and true rock aging that existed under the growths.

this isn’t a tank start over, we preserved his original cycle. A tank start over requires a new cycle: this was solely plant ejection.

 

[Paul B]

A couple of weeks ago I did a similar clean on my 50 year old reef. a few years ago I stupidly added photosynthitic sponge. Then discovered it is encrusting and invasive and there was no way to remove it as it covered everything.

I removed all the rocks and corals to vats but left the gravel intact. I just stirred it up and filtered out most of the detritus with 100% of the NSW the tank was filled with.

The NSW I collect is very high in silicates which I think was fueling the sponge. Most of the rocks I cleaned with a wire brush then left outside in sea water in the cold and dark

(Here in New York it is close to freezing)

I then put everything back in and filled the tank with 100% asw which I am not crazy about but I need to eliminate silicates now until I am sure I have none of that invasive sponge.

The fish and corals are back in and the tank now looks like a produce farm of algae which I will leave alone for now because I like the health benefits of algae. It has started to turn white and hopefully will die soon.

As It does I suck it out using my (very old) diatom filter which I do almost every day.

I still need to glue back a bunch of corals but I will wait until the algae dies back.

You can see some of the algae here but it covers the tank.

 

[brandon429]

Paul that is really really scary, to have such time and dedication in the system + have a naturally-selected sponge do that, it would make me sick to my stomach

you commanded it back well, those pictures are pure gold. I had a white invasive sponge get into my acanthastrea colony I had for years and I just couldn’t beat it even with weekly scraping off the target, it was acid-etching the skeleton and truly destroying the frag, I had to throw it out. If it got in my rocks I could not have beaten in, I truly 100% hope yours is gone. That’s fine surgery on a huge, seriously time invested tank, thank you for posting!

 

[Paul B]

Brandon, most of my rocks were totally covered in the stuff and it was encrusting so I couldn't pull it off the rocks as it was in all the crevaces so I had to use a wire brush and in some places hot water.

Much of it I had to bleach and I just threw some out.

It is the light blue stuff, kind of nice looking.


Here much of the rock is out.



Here is the tank with almost everything removed to vats.

Just after I cleaned it, it looked like this.

Much of my rock is big because I built it. This piece is the biggest and I made it by cementing smaller pieces together. It is probably 10 lbs.

 

[Shevlin77]

I have a 17 year old mixed reef heavily stocked. Live rock is 17 years old never been cleaned. Sand bed is also 17 years old. I have to add neo-nitro daily otherwise nitrates hit zero. Phos stays between .005 and .008

all that said, reading this thread now has me really nervous that i’m well overdue to clean my rocks and sand!

 

[brandon429]

No need to do it until you have a problem develop

glad you posted


what we deal with here is tank rehab techniques that work for everyone, full repeatability

the methods that get an untouched sandbed sitting on the bottom of an aquarium out to 17 years aren’t repeatable across the masses, hence the need for the thread, you can see across pages various states of wreckage we fix. states of decay and variances in export and import create varied conditions across owners, it’s not like everyone can just go hands off in a system and get it to work…the majority can’t in fact and they comprise the cipro dosers you read about, or the owners of fish kill systems who disturbed the sand and lost years of balanced fish in the tank: variation is what we see in old tanks, not consistency




cleaning is a way for the masses to earn consistency because it’s repeatable

if your tank has been balanced in such a way that no intervention is needed, don’t

and when it is needed, if things begin to crash or you have to transfer tanks for some reason then there’s a method on file that works for everyone

You’d continue the artistic guiding until you can’t anymore. Let’s see the sandbed pic if you can, the sandbed is the liability not so much the coral canopy


if someone is having fish kill issues or coral loss after years of allowing sand and other catchments in the tank to compile waste, it’s hard for them to reverse that trending by looking at a pic of someone’s coral, they need ordered steps to arrest the loss cycle

those steps are what we review here. I honestly wouldn’t undo your balance until you have to, that’s enough dilution so far for your reefing method and design

 

[mattdg]

I wonder how often those who think they are experiencing OTS, simply need to rebalance the chemistry in their water by either performing a 100% WC or adding something like Part C? I know tanks can get packed with detritus, over time. However, I have had very old systems that completely reset after a 90% WC. Anyone care to guess what the average age of a system might be, that is at risk of experiencing OTS? I assume any system 4 years or older?

 

[Northern Flicker]

I have a 17 year old mixed reef heavily stocked. Live rock is 17 years old never been cleaned. Sand bed is also 17 years old. I have to add neo-nitro daily otherwise nitrates hit zero. Phos stays between .005 and .008

all that said, reading this thread now has me really nervous that i’m well overdue to clean my rocks and sand!

What an awesome system there. 17 years - wow! Props

 

[brandon429]

The hardest thing to consider is the transmissibilty of what works for us into other people's systems

There are unspoken things hands off reefers do that aren't copied well, it only seems like a + b + c=d in hands off systems should work for everyone

The key is getting fifty of other people's systems to fall in line and track them as a collection. It's the hardest thing to do

For example: someone go into the nuisance algae forum and find a reefer with a gha jacked tank, and fix it, add it to a thread of fixes on file. Watch what happens when the fourth guy doses the fluconazole

Then when chemiclean is added for the cyano, still don't clean out the bed and by the time dinos hit the stress will be on + the pressure

The reason rip clean threads have tight outcome controls is because we're removing particulate waste not just the water that catches its leak from the sand or other zones of waste collection

The reason we want threads that always deal in particulate waste removal to the exclusion of any other method without blending other methods is to track a+b+c= control over the system as a basic measure to start from when unsure

We need opposing methods to gain work thread entrants to pattern short term and long term results

Once artistic skill catches on widespread, nobody will need rip cleaning. We've got to inspect counter measures other than rip cleans by getting into crashing tank threads and selling them on the alternate ways, they apply the stated measures, then we track out the outcomes across months and years across multiple systems/ put them in links for patterning

I tried all sorts of alternate methods in other people's tanks to arrive here. Nobody likes tank surgery it's hard and wasteful of water... but if I'm looking at being accountable for someone's twenty thousand dollar sps reef from across the way, and all I get to have to guide it are pics maybe a video if lucky there's no other method I'll use. This is the known safe method, arrived at by a few painful losses, embarrassing ones, along the way. This basic method streamlines all tanks for a skip cycle restart: no bottle bac used no parameter testing used and for sure no vile distasteful cipro used. I feel cipro use growing among hobbyists is a bad trend and it's something we'll never use here to retrain coral growth... there needs to be threads that don't follow major trending approaches, I'd like to have that here

 

[Shevlin77]

No need to do it until you have a problem develop

glad you posted


what we deal with here is tank rehab techniques that work for everyone, full repeatability

the methods that get an untouched sandbed sitting on the bottom of an aquarium out to 17 years aren’t repeatable across the masses, hence the need for the thread, you can see across pages various states of wreckage we fix. states of decay and variances in export and import create varied conditions across owners, it’s not like everyone can just go hands off in a system and get it to work…the majority can’t in fact and they comprise the cipro dosers you read about, or the owners of fish kill systems who disturbed the sand and lost years of balanced fish in the tank: variation is what we see in old tanks, not consistency




cleaning is a way for the masses to earn consistency because it’s repeatable

if your tank has been balanced in such a way that no intervention is needed, don’t

and when it is needed, if things begin to crash or you have to transfer tanks for some reason then there’s a method on file that works for everyone

You’d continue the artistic guiding until you can’t anymore. Let’s see the sandbed pic if you can, the sandbed is the liability not so much the coral canopy


if someone is having fish kill issues or coral loss after years of allowing sand and other catchments in the tank to compile waste, it’s hard for them to reverse that trending by looking at a pic of someone’s coral, they need ordered steps to arrest the loss cycle

those steps are what we review here. I

wouldn’t undo your balance until you have to, that’s enough dilution so far for your reefing method and design

Thanks and I will need to take a pic of the sand bed when I get home but will post it later.

As an added note I do vacuum out the sand when doing 30% water changes (every 3-4 weeks)

i’m sure that helps

 

[brandon429]

A two year system extended.

Build Thread - Fluval Evo 13.5 (First Saltwater Tank)

Hello, I am gonna go ahead and start my Build Thread. As of the start of this post this tank has been up for around 7 months. It is a Fluval Evo 13.5 AIO Tank. This is my first saltwater tank. So I am learning as I go. I decided to set up the fish tank on my desk next to my computer (Picture...

www.reef2reef.com

We can follow system updates to see how they fare in pattern here. Instead of using chemi clean, or adding animals, CrazyDuck959 just swapped his sandbed and de-aged his reef tank. The after pics look that way too, shocking laser clarity

The reason we collect jobs here is so we can study in pattern what happens if we view old tank syndrome as an accumulation issue, and then act accordingly. We need jobs on file using this method to the exclusion of any other method so we can find best practices among options.

 

[Vette67]

You know, I believe a few years ago I called BS. Yeah, I’m too lazy to scroll back and find my post. But having been in the hobby for 25 years now I have noticed a pattern. In 2013, at about the 11 year mark for my tank, I experienced a catastrophic tank crash. It was inundated with GHA and I lost about 75% of my coral. Prevailing thought at the time was that my rock was saturated with phos, so I took my rock out and treated it with a lot of lanthanum chloride. While simultaneously replacing my gravel (since everything was out already anyway). It was a total tank teardown. Believing my problem was solved with the lanthanum, I blissfully went back to reefing the way I had. Leaving my sand bed untouched.

Bring on 2023. 10 years after my last crash. Things started going south again. 10 year old coral colonies started dying for no reason. Cyanno mats everywhere…. Of course, ICP shows nothing alarming and neither did Aquabiomics. So, I tried going the biodiversity route, adding mud and sand to my tank. That didn’t help. Much. So I tried stirring my sand. That gave me temporary relief, but the death returned. Then I went nuclear and decided to tear down my tank, one half at a time and replace all of my sand, a couple months apart. This is the first 2/3 of the tank, torn apart and sand removed. Not fun tearing down a 180 gallon tank.

so then a few months later, I did the rest of the tank, the right side

And guess what? Ever since replacing my sand, thing have been stable and thriving again. Which had me rethinking my 2013 crash. It probably wasn’t the rock being phos bound that caused my crash, it was probably a rotted sandbed. It has been my experience that the carrying capacity of an untouched sandbed is about 10 years.

Now I wouldn’t recommend going this long. And I no longer just sit back and do nothing. I am going in regularly (maybe twice a year) with a power head and blasting the snot out of my sandbed. Stirring up a storm. Within an hour or 2, things clear up and are back to normal. So we will see if I can go longer than 10 years between sandbed replacements now, with some regular sandbed stirring.

This was my sandbed blast from last weekend.

 

[brandon429]

A new job below here, well done!

What we do here is de-age reef tanks, get them under control by physical force not by testing or with additives. Another one we can track outcomes now that the rip clean is complete:

before

after

the thread with details

Advice for changing sand on established tank with sand sifter

So my uncle passed away back August and left behind several of his tanks, only one saltwater tank with life in it. It’s a biocube, but he was pretty weak towards the end and admittedly it got a little out of hand. I somehow managed to drive the tank and fish from Colorado to Washington and keep...

www.reef2reef.com

the point of collecting these examples is so readers can subscribe to the tank owner and watch the life arc of their tanks after we bootcamp the reef they own.

its true all our jobs are the same method, same outcome, but we need the new examples here to watch for variations in outcome from prior logs and in case prior examples don't stay active with updates.

 

[MnFish1]

A new job below here, well done!

What we do here is de-age reef tanks, get them under control by physical force not by testing or with additives. Another one we can track outcomes now that the rip clean is complete:

before

after

the thread with details

Advice for changing sand on established tank with sand sifter

So my uncle passed away back August and left behind several of his tanks, only one saltwater tank with life in it. It’s a biocube, but he was pretty weak towards the end and admittedly it got a little out of hand. I somehow managed to drive the tank and fish from Colorado to Washington and keep...

www.reef2reef.com

the point of collecting these examples is so readers can subscribe to the tank owner and watch the life arc of their tanks after we bootcamp the reef they own.

its true all our jobs are the same method, same outcome, but we need the new examples here to watch for variations in outcome from prior logs and in case prior examples don't stay active with updates.

The question I would like to see answered is 'what does this tank look like in 3, 6, 12 months. Some habits/parameters/something has to change - otherwise the tank will be right back where it was, or?

 

[brandon429]

if I was a vehicle mechanic and someone leaves my shop 100% repaired, and then they're back in the shop 2mos later because their driving didn't change to more efficient, in no way do I link that outcome to the original repair when they left my shop. We would fix their car again until they get good at driving, and don't need it.


Idea:

let's do a handoff, you guide 1 or 2 for a year as the sole consultant. I can send you some jobs as they arise, we can watch how you handle regrowths

I will ask the next few examples to try that method and we can match what works long term to what fixes tanks really quickly/rip cleans.


if I get to run some of the challenge tanks a year, this is the formula we will use/have been using in threads:

-lighting. the #1 cause of most invasion issues is not phosphate and it's not nitrate, it's chasing ultra bright lighting for every square inch of the tank, the more is better approach to lighting nearly all of us started with and few veer away from. Muting the lighting intensity and spectrum on challenge tanks is the first thing we fix. corals grow just fine under bluer, less intense lighting with great feeding in place.

-manual controls are the final say in all reef tank invasions. don't own a reef tank with an inaccessible scape = "I can't reach my rocks it might break my arch glued in place in 2019" <--don't make reef tanks that way unless you're naturally good at not being invaded.


we can consult chemical means, cheats like Fluc for rough cases, along the way.

I don't prescribe clean up crews to my repair jobs, ever. That's a good way to vector in pestilence / uronema et al/ into somone's reef tank.

if someone wants to access a CUC and then fallow it correctly, go to town. install them all that's fine by me. if they put too much waste into the tank as daily pellets we can just rip clean it again when needed.

as we work on sustained tank repair, fish disease is kept in view that's one thing we do differently than the masses who will install any vector into a reef tank if it might possibly save some manual work.

Here is an alternate work thread to mine, this one is for controlling dinos

how are they doing, flip through the pages see the pic successions.

Dinoflagellates – Are You Tired Of Battling Altogether?

For ostreo I micro dosed bleach as per the old dino thread. This is controversial as it can kill your fish but corals and clean up crew seem to be unaffected. Ostreo was wiped out in less than 5 days and no sign of it returning in over a month now. Unfortunately I didnt extend the micro...

www.reef2reef.com

that's 700 pages of non rip clean tank work

I'm wanting to demonstrate a reef control method with tighter outcome controls than that method.

the key is, our method isn't really practical for large tanks. but that leaves thousands, thousands of workable 40-50 gallon tanks and below who would be happy to turn a wrecked investment into a shiny one

that's the market aimed for in rip clean threads, the surgical reset with skip cycle final assembly. total evacuation of target cells and associated organic waste plugs for surface area in the system. then the reefer can feed well since the tank is clean and hungry, the new sustained protein drives corals nicely, lighting can be tuned better in the majority of cases and all the methods from that giant counter work thread option above will work better when there's less target mass in the system.

a rip clean refreshes any reef, it doesn't harm them. A perfectly healthy normal tank is boosted by them, we move healthy reef tanks all the time using rip clean methods. that's a lot of post rip clean tanks to be tracked...simply select some of the random users in the sand rinse thread and find their tank post outcomes. lemme know of wrecked ones you see in pattern.

 

[Garf]

if I was a vehicle mechanic and someone leaves my shop 100% repaired, and then they're back in the shop 2mos later because their driving didn't change to more efficient, in no way do I link that outcome to the original repair when they left my shop. We would fix their car again until they get good at driving, and don't need it.


Idea:

let's do a handoff, you guide 1 or 2 for a year as the sole consultant. I can send you some jobs as they arise, we can watch how you handle regrowths

I will ask the next few examples to try that method and we can match what works long term to what fixes tanks really quickly/rip cleans.


if I get to run some of the challenge tanks a year, this is the formula we will use/have been using in threads:

-lighting. the #1 cause of most invasion issues is not phosphate and it's not nitrate, it's chasing ultra bright lighting for every square inch of the tank, the more is better approach to lighting nearly all of us started with and few veer away from. Muting the lighting intensity and spectrum on challenge tanks is the first thing we fix. corals grow just fine under bluer, less intense lighting with great feeding in place.

-manual controls are the final say in all reef tank invasions. don't own a reef tank with an inaccessible scape = "I can't reach my rocks it might break my arch glued in place in 2019" <--don't make reef tanks that way unless you're naturally good at not being invaded.


we can consult chemical means, cheats like Fluc for rough cases, along the way.

I don't prescribe clean up crews to my repair jobs, ever. That's a good way to vector in pestilence / uronema et al/ into somone's reef tank.

if someone wants to access a CUC and then fallow it correctly, go to town. install them all that's fine by me, we can just rip clean the sandbed again soon when it's full of CUC pellet waste~

as we work on sustained tank repair, fish disease is kept in view.

I won't be asking for anyone's test kit readings, due to the range of readouts we can all search out to see test kit brand comparison threads showing. Nobody here is really working with the nitrate and phosphate levels they think they have, this is why sustained repairs are absolutely terrible in comparison work threads, like this one:

Dinoflagellates – Are You Tired Of Battling Altogether?

For ostreo I micro dosed bleach as per the old dino thread. This is controversial as it can kill your fish but corals and clean up crew seem to be unaffected. Ostreo was wiped out in less than 5 days and no sign of it returning in over a month now. Unfortunately I didnt extend the micro...

www.reef2reef.com

that's 700 pages of non rip clean tank work, with a very very very poor sustained fix rate. in that thread, nobody's N or P readings are challenged they're all accepted and a prescribed dose of fertilizer is offered to the tank owner-- the results are on file to check for outcome patterns.

the undeniable pattern there is: dinos, changed to GHA, then that degraded collective mass is changed to Cyano, they buy chemiclean, they stay on the dole for months with no end in site. a select few get helped, say 5% of the entire threads jobs?


That thread is still needed and shouldn't be unstickied, large tank owners cannot just rip clean for an easy win/developments are needed for large tanks


where that thread rips off the masses is not telling readers that for tanks roughly 40 gallons or less, they should not use their method, they should use ours.

From the linked thread, I quote;

for sand sifters you just give them a food pellet after the cleaning work

Not ever having a sand sifting starfish myself, are you sure this is viable guidance and that you haven't created a nutrient bomb in the sand through starvation? Just curious where this advice originated, don't sound quite right to me.

 

[brandon429]

nice hypothetical

I would never assume a food pellet put into a reef would harm it or it's sandbed. I injected cyclopeeze under the stars I had and they ate it.

again, I'm keeping this thread related to specific pics or threads of outcomes, that is how we keep arguments at bay.

if you can find someone's reef tank I harmed, post those and I'll account for it. Eventually, all happy outcomes are going to have to mean something to my critics.