Asylumdown's 275 Tank build

[sharkbait]

Wow I couldn't imagine how rough that must have been for you! Keep trucking, you tank is amazing!

[asylumdown]

I've done some investigating. We had a party on Saturday night, and every time I went near the laundry room, the door was closed. I kept opening it, but the last time I checked was about midnight. There's indigo stains all over the inside of the wall and door, right at butt height, so you can imagine why the door kept getting closed...

We have a massive server stack in there that powers the home automation and distributed audio/video system for the house. We know it puts out a lot of heat, which is why for the last 7 months the door to the laundry room has never been closed. While I was doing a complete reset to the QT system today, I closed the door to see how hot it would get. After 2 hours it was 30 degrees in there. I've done every test I can think of on the water they were in, but I don't have a max/min thermometer. My best guess is that the water got too hot and the dissolved O2 fell below levels anything could survive in. The tank had too many fish for it's size already, so I doubt there was a wide margin of error for oxygen. It's either that, or a drunk party guest decided the fish needed a drink. Pretty brutal considering how close they were to going back in to the main tank. Between the failed hypo treatment in the sump and then the QT system, I've had them 'in treatment' since August. That much time and effort blown to pieces less than two weeks away from the finish line.

Does anyone know if a tank crash like this will also damage the bacteria bed in a canister filter? I tried to save it by running it in an empty salt bucket with water from the nuked system, and today I cleaned the tank and all the equipment and re-filled it with 100% new salt water. The canister filter is back attached to the QT tank now, so I dosed it with enough ammonium chloride to hit 1.5ppm this afternoon to both keep the bacteria alive, but also to test whether it's going to go through a cycle again. After 6 hours the level of ammonia doesn't seem to have fallen any. I'm not sure if that means my filter is toast or not.

I'm going to be out of town more than I'm in for the next 4 weeks, so I won't be getting any new fish for a while, but I'm going to try and see this as an opportunity to do this whole thing again properly. I'm going to add fish slowly, and only after a rigorous prophylactic treatment of copper. All new corals are going to be quarantined in the new cadlights all-in-one nano tank I just bought to make sure that not a single drop of outside, potentially contaminated water will make it in to my system. It's not going to be easy, but I am going to try my hardest to make my system pathogen free going forward.

I'm also going to take this time to try and deal with my growing aiptasia problem using berghia. I'm pretty sure the reason I never had success with them in my last tank was that a) I let the problem get so out of hand the nudibranch's couldn't make a dent in their short lifespans and b) I had tried peppermint shrimp first (which didn't work) and I'm pretty sure the shrimp were eating both the nudis and their eggs and c) I had wrasses that I'm pretty sure were also eating the berghia. Since my tank is going to be fishless now for at least 6 more weeks (groan!), I may as well try berghia again as there's nothing in that tank that could eat them, and the problem isn't so bad they couldn't clear it out.

Other than that I'm actually blown away at how well the display is doing. Now that the algae is gone, corals that seemed like they were in stasis are bursting to life. Frags that hadn't grown an inch in months are sending out base plates at a rate I didn't think was possible. I had no idea how inhibiting algae could be to coral growth. I tried taking some top down photos tonight when the lights were on their way to being super blue, and man, I just can't figure out how to make the LEDs jive with my iPhone. The photos look nothing at all like it does in real life, it's like the sensor only sees the blue, and then captures is as horribly as possible. I tried adjusting the white balance in photoshop afterwards, and this was the best I could do:


This coral came to me completely browned out, with only the tiniest hint of blue at the tips. It's probably changed the most out of all my corals. This pic is as close to how it looks in real life as I could get with photoshop.

[asylumdown]

Was out of town for the past couple of days, came home literally shocked at how much the coral had grown. Getting rid of that algae was the best decision I ever made!

Also, did a 50 gallon water change, skimmer clean, full change of phosphate media and hanna phosphate test in... 45 minutes. Bam! The time and money planning this thing is finally paying off.

Now to get some fish...

[gregzz4]

I don't know what to say about your system Adam as it looks like you have it under control ...

All I will add is you may want to add an alarm for your QT temp ...

Sorry I don't have any better advice

[lastlight]

Really sad news about your fish bro. You're definitely due some good news for a change hope things only get better from here.

[asylumdown]

Thanks friends!

So I ended up having to cancel my trip to Hawaii because of school, which sucks on a whole different level, but I consoled myself by going on a fish binge today. My QT tank is completely cycled at this point, so it was either keep dosing ammonium chloride, or by something with a metabolism to do it for me!

Most expensive purchase:
Golden rhomboidal wrasse

Most sentimental purchase
Harlequin tusk fish. The one I lost was easily my favourite fish.

Everyone was eating after a couple hours in the QT tank today, so tomorrow I'm going to start ramping up cupramine levels for a prophylactic treatment. If I do it right, I should have fish in my tank again in 3 weeks.

On another note, I took my skimmer apart tonight for it's first ever major cleaning. When I put it back together I realized that for hte past 7 months the adapter that holds the pump to the skimmer body has been loose. I was complaining about the noise it makes way back in the beginning, and did need to get a part of the pump replaced, but now after a simple tightening the skimmer is absolutely silent. Now once I get the bearing replacement kit for my Reeflo Dart return pump, my tank should be near silent.

[asylumdown]

So I'm officially done using copper. For good. Of the 7 fish I bought to replace the guys who died, two survived the prophylactic cupramine treatment. I knew some or all had ich (flashing, came from tanks with visible ich present), so there was no way I wasn't going to treat them, but good lord.

To add insult to injury, I have now done enough research on Cryptocarion irritans to quote it's life-cycle stages in my sleep, and I'm no longer convinced that the recommended course of cupramine (or any copper medication) is sufficient to eradicate ich from a system. It will definitely clear it from the fish, but since you're 'supposed' to leave the fish in the quarantine tank for a couple of weeks after completing the copper treatment, you run a very real risk of the fish becoming re-infected in the QT from tomonts that lodged in places you couldn't clean (the bio-media of your filter, for example) that encysted before copper reached therapeutic levels. Crypt tomonts can easily stay encysted for 5+ weeks, and no one would recommend treating a fish that long. Basically, the 14 day recommended course of treatment on the cupramine bottle is woefully insufficient to clear the parasite based on well established published literature. I think they recommend 14 days because anything longer is dangerous to the fish.

The only treatment method that I've seen that makes any sense from a 'total eradication' perspective is the tank transfer method, which takes the wild card tomonts out of the picture completely. As a result, I've completely re-done my QT system to accommodate for this method:

Gone is the 40 gallon breeder with external canister filter, and in it's place is two 15 gallon tanks, each with their own light, heater, and power head:


I transferred my two survivors from the 40 gallon (which still had therapeutic levels of copper, I let it run for my two survivors an extra week) to one of the 15s, which was sterile and, taking care to transfer as little water as possible.


I then bleach bombed everything that had been in water in the 40 (heater, powerhead, canister filter, PVC lengths) and cleaned and dried everything. I was thinking I would then re-set up the canister filter and cycle it in a 5 gallon bucket in the garage so that I could add it back to one of the 15s after the final tank transfer was complete for a future batch of fish, but now I'm thinking that filter might be overkill for a 15 gallon tank:


Instead, I might cycle the media from an aquaclear 20 in a bucket and just put that on one of the 15s after the last transfer is complete.

For the 2 fish that I do have, I've basically just done the first transfer of the transfer process, but since they spent three weeks in therapeutic levels of copper, and were in that water right up to the moment they were transferred to this new tank, I'm not sure if I need to do the full transfer protocol. There's no tomonts in this new 15 gallon to re-infect them now that the copper levels are zero, so assuming there's no signs of re-infection by thursday, I might just put them back in the display. I bought a 2 litre of prime to deal with the ammonia that's going to result from keeping fish in filterless tanks.

So far, I can say that the biggest fear I had about using this method was the stress to the fish, but while the transfer itself was clearly unpleasant for them, within 3 minutes of being in the new water they were acting totally normally, and ate an hour later, so it's the trade-off of the acute, but highly temporary stress of catching them every three days, vs the stress of continuously subjecting them to poison for weeks and then them being re-infected. I think the acute but temporary stress is better.