Tank Cleaning..

[c0n]

Wow. I havent touched the sandbed in about 3 months, and i decided to do some maintinence today..my water is soooo dirty now..hehe, newaz to teh point. Is stirring up all the sand OK to do, and im removing some seaweed, should i do it in stages, or all at once? i dont want to shock the system too much, but i really need to clean this crap out!

 

[liquid]

Can you describe your system to us? What type of sandbed you have, your filtration, lighting, etc?

Shane

 

[Len]

I'd do everything slowly. Small stresses paritioned over time are better handled then large ones all at once. I've found stirring up the sand bed causes some fish to break out in external disease like Ich, so I'd minimize it as much as possible. There might not even be a good reason to vacuum the sandbed; most people don't touch their sandbeds at all nowadays.

Remove the macroalgae (aka seaweed) whenever they become overgrown. Too much macroalgae in the display, IME, has many problems associated it such as overgrowing corals, causing big oxygen and pH changes from night to day, and the algae going sexual when it gets too big.

 

[c0n]

sorry it took so long to respond. (school work..blah blah) 2" sandbed, coarse crushed coral, 75g aga, 1200gph running the main feed to the tank, top fathom 250 skimmer, just added carbon/phosphate sponge filtration, 55g sump...prolly about 25# LR..which is totally inadaquate for the size of the tank..i had 3 greem chromis, and a percula clown, but the clown got ate up by the pump..and 1 of the chromis died..he was shell shocked from my dads sump(way more pumps than mine) he never did do well in there....anyways back to the point...i pulled about 3# of seaweed out of the tank that day, stirred up the sandbed, and siphoned out all the crap(or what looked like crap)...and im happy to report now...NO MORE CYANO HERE..so now im just getting my water cycled once or twice before i go pickup a snowflake moray..

 

[Anonymous]

i usually once a week stir up the SURFACE of the sand bed and will vaccum with a tube..the tubes you use for a small pump...but you do wanna limit it being stirred up..it has a tendancy to irritate the fish's skin...i only stir it up just to get small organisms moving around for my filter feeders...

8)

 

[WRASSER]

CON,
DEPENDING ON WHAT TYPE OF TANK YOU HAVE,YOU COULD PUT A RED CORIS OR DRAGON WRASSE, MAYBE A COUPLE OF DIFFERNT TANGS. THE WRASSE WILL KEEP THE SAND STIRRED UP AND THE TANGS WILL KEEP THE SEAWEED DOWN, KEEPING YOUR HANDS OUT A LITTLE LONGER! GOOD LUCK.


WRASSER 8)