rebuilding the reef.
 

Well Saturday I finally got off my lazy a$$ and tore the tank down, scraped the coralline off the glass and drained it.. scraped more coralline and siphoned the crud out of the bottom, after putting 5 gal of calurpa in my compost.

anyways once it was cleaned up I filled it dumped 2 gal of bleach in it and turned it on. tonight I neutralized the bleach and drained the tank, filled it, ran for 10 min and drained it again now I am filling it once more. if it runs clear I will be putting 5 gal of vinegar in it and running it while I am camping.

more to come.

Steve

Why bleach it, is the tank pretty grody? So no tank currently setup right now?

I have a tank in the garage with some rock, a few corals and a fish. I am bleaching it to be sure there are no surviving algae, or anything else in the pipe work, ect.

Steve

well cleaning process is over, 4 days running 100 gal system with 2 gal of bleach, the 8 water changes after neutralizing the bleach. 10 day of running with 5 gal of vinegar, and 4 water changes and on the last one I ran it for 24 hours with a double dose of tap water conditioner to make sure I got all the chemicals out.

now I am filling it with RO. I am going to fill it completely then mix the salt. as I add rock I will have to remove water but I will use that water to do a water change on my old rock I have cooking in the garage.

Steve

How's it going now?

well, salinity is at 1.022, going to adjust it up a little more maybe after I check it tonight as that was with a high water level so I let it evaporate down to normal. I am not putting any rock in yet as I am painting out the front room as we speak. for thoes that are interested cloverdale paints makes a new one that has absolutly no smell (painted two coats of two walls on sunday night and then went for coffee... came home and you could not smell the new paint whats so ever)

looks like the rock survived the fresh water garage reef, lots of coraline still on it and snails and crabs still running around, so maybe by next weekend I will be ready to move stuff over... but I have to finnish painting first:redface:

Steve

Good to hear you didn't get much die-off.

well aside from the 500.00 worth of corals I had in there:neutral:

Steve

Oh I thought you just had a few frags, sorry!

3 frags at about 80.00 each to replace and a rather large brain which would probably be around 300.00 to replace.

Steve

Wow, that must have been quite the brain coral!

Island Prices :)

ya about 18" across when it was swelled up.

Steve

yup which are pretty close to yours lately:mrgreen:

Steve

Ok, so I had the salinity adjusted to 1.025 by a refractometer (thanks Zulu, never new what I was missing till I used one.)

on Wednesday I figured I better get something in the tank as it has been running over a month with just water. So I put the rock in and turned on the actinic and the one 14K MH bulb I have. (got to buy some 10Ks and sell this 14K I think).

I dug up an old AB bulb I have and stuck it in the other side yesterday, looks good still and having only a 3 foot tank the two lights blend instead of making two distinct light areas.

so Saturday I went to Safari and replaced the fish, so right now I am officially running a FOWLR. Going to be having to find some frags soon here but I want to get the Ca reactor and stuff ready first.

Steve

guess I should throw a couple pics in here.

here is the tank with just rock, 2 VHO and 1 14K MH

http://www.members.shaw.ca/crystalk/...t/tankrock.jpg

here is the tank 5 days later with the addition of a 10K MH and fish

http://www.members.shaw.ca/crystalk/...nkrockfish.jpg

and a close up of the first tang I have had that doesn't hide all the time

http://www.members.shaw.ca/crystalk/restart/tang.jpg


So I guess the next step is to finish cleaning the old rock that I have cooking in the garage and add some more of it, and to start getting frags.

Steve