melev

I'm glad to see all the corals and fishes are doing fine Marc! ;-)

I would expect the nitrates to climb due to stress on the inhabitants from all the moving around etc. In particular, I would keep a close watch on your snail population, as they can start a chain reaction, and smoke a tank with nitrate & ammonia. I don't see that you checked ammonia (at least not reported in your post) and that is liable to be your first sign of an impending crash. The anemone is splitting due to habitat stress as well.

This is truly unavoidable in your situation, but as you know, there are measures that you can take to further protect the system. While I have used Prime during tank moves, etc. I am not sure it does all that we want it to. If I was in your situation, I would be employing Poly Filters for sure. Plus pulling any snails out that I can find, and either tossing or QT'ing them. ANother thing you can do is add some fresh sand right to your holding tanks. This will help buffer and control nutrient spikes.

The hard part about what you are doing is that there is so much stuff to keep track of, it can get overwhelming. What would be cool, is if you developed a scenario based check list for your fans. For instance, one for tank moves, one for crashes, etc. That would be a nice addition to your web site!

The key being that whenever rock and coral are exposed to air, there can be some die-off. Rock in particular will be teeming with stuff that will just expire when exposed to air, especially such long established rock such as yours. Then there's the detritus that gets kicked up during the breakdown. That releases huge amounts of pollutants as well.

I know you know all this stuff, but it is always helpful to get reminders once-in-a-while!

BTW, I would be interested in your guesstimate of how much your rock weighs now, vs. when you put it in. I had 750 LBS in my system going in, but only 433 LBS came out when I shut it down.

Wow, you lost 317 lbs of rock? how does that happen?

Actually, I would expect Nitrate to rise because of three things: 1) No DSB to denitrify, 2) Not enough water changes to export it, and 3) Feeding my fish. I'm not dosing as much vodka as before, which I'm sure has also added to the rising numbers.

The tank was broken down July 4th, which was 90 days ago. The LR wasn't even tied into the livestock system until 6-7 weeks later after it tested safely with zero ammonia and zero nitrite.

I totally agree with you about having to track a lot of stuff, because everything is re-arranged and somewhat inaccessible. The construction phase makes it even worse, but once the stand and new sump are in place, that should help immensely. At the same time, I'd prefer to get the fishroom as done as possible before putting those in to keep them clean.

I've not seen any unusual snail die-off, and since the breakdown the system has been running about 1 degree cooler on average. Astreas probably prefer the 78-79F my tank tends to hover around, instead of 79-81F it was previously.

Since I didn't transfer the sandbed and didn't tie in the rock, I blame myself for the rise in NO3. Had I done more frequent water changes or allowed the vodka to dose closer to the previous levels, it would have been better but I've had a lot of travel during this period that allowed things to get a little nutty.

I just broke down the calcium reactor. I had over 6" of media left, but the reactor was trapping air every day. The media came out like a round cake, essentially one piece that didn't fall apart as I tossed it in the trash. I refilled the reactor with Tropic Eden's large media. Glad to get that taken care of.

I didn't plan to weigh the rock, but perhaps it might be interesting to know what's going in the new tank.

Marc,
what product did you use to raise the mag?

And I would assume that you are adding more rock than what was in the 280???

I mix up my own using Magnesium Chloride and Magnesium Sulfate. I'm copying Randy Holmes-Farley's Recipe #2, and I mix up a batch twice a year. It makes 1-gallon each time.

I had more rock cooking forever so I really have enough, I think. I won't know until I'm stacking it... and I may add some Marco Rock after the fact.

Been having some corals STN and some more RTN lately and couldn't relate it to anything as all my parameters were fine with nitrates around 5. Then when I changed Nitrate testkit I got a perfect 0 even 1 day after a half full skimmer cup was accidentally dropped int eh system by a skimmer overflow. tested with a friends kit and got a nitrate reading of 40.
Never imagined Nitrates to be such a silent killer as I don't see any hair alga or cyano in the tank or sump...

did you decide yet if you will go with a DSB with the new tank? Had a DSB in all the tanks I had so far and while I had no old tank syndrom or any crashes from a disturbed DSB.. I feel that it was not as good as it's supposed to be in dealing with phosphates or nitrates... Not sure why, could be that mine was not set properly. so I'm wondering if I should go with a SSB. Only concern is wether I should syphon the SSB or if I could leave it without having to take corals out for a weekly syphon?

I did a 55g water change today and am mixing up another 55g for tomorrow. I'll see about getting the nitrate down although the damage is already done unfortunately.

Yes, I'm doing a 4" sand bed again. That is why there is a pallet of sand in my garage right now, awaiting the new tank. If you run a 1" sandbed, you can siphon it clean as often as you wish. Steve Weast only had one bag of sand in his beautiful reef and it was merely there for aesthetics. He would siphon out all the old sand and pour in a new bag each time he wanted to do so. In this way, his valley always had a beautiful sandy channel in the center. We tend to fill our tanks full width, where he only had a small visible section he decorated with sand.