Tank Crash. Lost all my corals :(

[OCDP]

Originally Posted by christyf5

Basically you're letting the algae run out of nutrients as well as giving them no light to thrive. Its mostly the no light thing that gets rid of it, I found putting a handful of hermits in there as well got the job done as they had nothing else to eat but the algae.

Yeah it is a pain in the arse doing it for more than couple of months, I found that it depends on how much algae you have and the type of algae, browns seem to die off more quickly than say, green hair algae. For GHA it took a minimum of 6-8 weeks (this was on another batch of rock I "cooked" mostly I just didn't want to use it and was going to take it back to the store but never got around to it. It lived in a rubbermaid tote for about 8 months). At the time I cooked my rock I really really hated my tank and never spent more than a few minutes topping up the FW and feeding the fish. So really not looking so critically at the tank helped in my case

It certainly can't hurt just doing it short term although you won't see the full benefits. If nothing else it will at least leach out any gack into a different water source other than your tank. I doubt the algae will diminish much though, it can live for quite awhile without any light before it finally kicks off.

Well that all makes sense. I don't have a full blown algae outbreak though, but there's a bit of hair algae that's driving me mad. I was just going to add some snails to take care of it... and perhaps a sea hare. It doesn't even cover all my rocks, just a few of them and there's only a few patches per rock, so I am debating as to whether or not it's worth cooking, or just giving the rocks to someone for super cheap or for free, and just replacing them myself.

I think they do need a good rinse after all this though, so I'll take some of the smaller pieces and rinse them out tonight.

I guess I need to decide if I want to shut the tank down for a couple months (seeing as I do have fish and a few corals alive), and cook the rock.. or if I suck it up, rinse and scrub the rocks, get rid of the worst pieces , get some snails and a sea hare, and start over that way.

I was about to upgrade my tank as well, so if I were to do that.. I could remove my sand bed which would get rid of quite a bit of nutrients, rinse and scrub my rock, and so on...

I dunno what to do ??? Upgrading and scrubbing/rinsing the rocks and removing the bad pieces and replacing them sounds best.. and with the addition of some snails and a sea hare, things might clear up pretty well.

Whatever I decide on I want to act as fast as possible. Upgrading would give me the motivation to clean the rocks up and get a couple new pieces, remove the bad ones.. I'll also be able to get rid of that damn sandbed.