Can I do without LR?

[MarcoPolo]

Hi,

I have a 150g reef tank, BB with only a few pieces of LR in the display tank, SPS and few fish (1 blue tang, 2 clown and 4 damsel). My problem is high nutrients, most likely coming from sump which is quite big and - aside the skimmer - is cluttered with LR probably full over time with detritus and leaching phosphate.

I am thinking of removing most of the LR from the sump, give the sump a good clean up, and leave it that way, easy to clean and maintain. My concern is if removing most of the LR will harm my tank?? I have around 60-80 pounds of LR.

Today I observed a display tank in a LFS which only had SPS, BB and a few fish. In the sump only a skimmer and GFO. The tank looked great, lots of coralline algae, SPS in good shape.

Does this mean a reef tank can do well even without LR?

[shifty51008]

can it work without LR, Yes. there are lots of people that do this, depending on the fish and what not you usually want a bigger skimmer than you normally would have to make up for the rock and usually bigger more frequient water changes.

rock plays a big part of keeping the bacteria in the tank that converts ammonia down to nitrates and also helps remove them, my guess is you don't have enough flow if junk is settling in the rocks. I would highly suggest just taking out the rock and cleaning the rock and sump and then placing it back in with more flow.

[Duvallj]

If you remove the live rock slowly, few rocks/day. This will just allow time for more bacteria to grow somewhere else. Same idea as replacing gravel in another tank without causing a cycle.