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Originally Posted by mike31154
Interesting. The idea of the chunk of styrofoam holding what I assume to be probes is nifty!
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Ya, it has worked out quite well. Ghetto, but it does the job :-)
Quote:
Originally Posted by mike31154
Not sure about the whole cleaning thing though. So now you're removed all of these nasty feather dusters & tube worms that were presumably consuming some amount of nutrients or whatever in your system. Are you not somewhat apprehensive about how that may affect it short term?
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The thought had crossed my mind as I was harvesting gobs and gobs of tube worms and dusters. No doubt they will probably affect the system in some way. What that affect is remains to be seen (or not). Certainly there is the possibility that my tank will crash. Or maybe it'll just be very very unhappy with the lack of dusters.
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Originally Posted by mike31154
Might be a bit of a shock removing all that matter at once? Something else in your system now has to take up the nutrient consuming duties all these little critters were performing?
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I'm hoping that will be the skimmer, since the skimmer is really what's competing with the dusters for organic nutrients in the form of particulates, etc. I'm not so sure the worms and dusters directly consume nitrates and/or phosphates. If they do the BioPellets and GFO should be able to pick up the slack.
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Originally Posted by mike31154
Sorry, tons of questions, but really interested in what your observation & perhaps water parameters will be for the next little while.
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Speaking of parameters, before I performed the deep clean on the sump I did a gamut of tests as I realized I hadn't performed any tests since last August. I was prepared for some crazy bad numbers but it wasn't as bad as I feared.
Nitrates: 0.2 (Salifert)
Phosphates: 0.04 (Hana)
Alk: 7.7 (Hana)
Calc: 450 (Hana)
Mag: Untested (because I hate testing Mag).
It has been almost 24 hours now since the removal so I will do another set of tests after dinner and see if the numbers are any different.