280g Inwall

[fishytime]

I feel for ya Tony.....really I do.....I always try and steer peeps away from doing a chemical band-aid type solutions, in favor of trying to figure out whats causing the issue......in your case I think we know whats causing it.....its a new tank.....perhaps the fact that the tank is in its infancy combined with the treatment is what caused the clamcrash?

[reefwars]

any chance its expired or something?? sorry to hear about your little buddies i hope it gets better for youcheers

[Delphinus]

I do agree with you Doug, I was really torn on this but the thing that made me pull the trigger in the end was that it was starting to bring down other livestock - snails who eat cyano die and it was smothering the blue zoas I had bought from Greg a little while ago. I'm not sure if they're recoverable at this point.

Anyhow I'm home now and I guess karma has been kind to me today. The carnage is not as bad as what it sounded like. Definitely dead is my blue spotted squamosa. My teardrop is gaping badly as is my hippopus. Linda forgot about my small crocea and small maxima so didn't check them when telling me the sitrep over the phone but luckily so far they seem to be OK.

What's happened is when I put my skimmer back online last night, I juryrigged it so that it was sucking hardly any air because it foams up so bad at first startup after a cyano treatment. What I failed to take into account was that the ATO is fed into the skimmer intake (an idea someone told me about that keeps the venturi clear of deposits. It works well but..). I actually did unplug the topup controller thinking that this would be good enough. Anyhow, wrong. What happened is all that suction from the skimmer recirc caused a siphon and emptied the top up reservoir. So the skimmer overflowed like crazy, the 5g bucket I was draining into spilled over so there's water everywhere, smells lovely too, and the sump is filled to the top. It emptied my RO/DI reservoir but since I filled it up on Sundays, it should have no more than 1/2 - 2/3 full at this point so it should only have dumped about 20g into the tank. The salinity has definitely been pulled down but only a few points. That's probably why the clams are gaping although I'm surprised that there is a definitely death on account of the salinity so I'm still wondering if it could have been the cyano treatment.

No cyano though yay?

[fishoholic]

Sorry to hear Tony Hopefully the cyano stays away and doesn't cause you any more grief.

[lastlight]

Sorry to hear this Tony. Don't give up man.

[globaldesigns]

Ah man, real sorry to hear of the issues. Hopefully no more casualties will arise from this. Keep us posted.

give me a shout when you are ready to instruct me on your tank maintenance for your holidays. I am available when you are... til then.

[muck]

Damn Tony... sorry to hear this.

Any update?

[Delphinus]

Didn't really have much of a chance to do much of anything this morning before having to head out but as far as I could tell the remaining clams weren't gaping anymore, but pulled in. This could be because as far as they were concerned it was still the middle of the night so hopefully that's all it was.

Mopped up the stinky skimmer water off the floor yesterday and tinkered with the skimmer some more and it seemed to be still behaving. Air cranked way back and flow dialed down and it's still creating a tower of foam.

No idea why the squamosa kicked it. Typical case of "look fine one day" to "totally dead the next day". For all I know it's just coincidence that this happened to that clam, or it was the red slime remover, and maybe it was either the dead clam smell or 1 point drop in salinity that caused the others to gape (or it was the red slime remover but I can't even count how many times I've run one before without any incident). Despite dumping at least 20 gallons RO/DI into the tank, between the larger water volume and maybe most of it dumping out via the skimmer the SG only went from 1.025 to 1.024. I figured that if my standard water change is 24g and it takes 12 cups of salt to make 1.025 then assuming total water volume of 280g it actually needs 5 cups of salt or w/c water at 1.035 to bring that 280g back to 1.025 or spread out over two water changes to bring it up 0.0005 at a time. Man it doesn't LOOK like such a big tank when you look at some of others out there but that sure feels like a lot of salt for not a whole lot of change in SG.

But actually what I'm going to do for now is let some of the water evaporate out of the tank and that will drift the SG back up anyhow and I'll see where things are at tonight. It was already down 1" this morning (this cold snap means some extra dry air) and only has about 2.5" ish to go before it's back to normal level.