jeffeg
05/08/2016, 11:46 AM
My situation is probably a little different than most. My tank had been established for about 2 years, really thriving sps/mixed reef.
About 6-8 months ago the tank started to have issues with nuisance algae, mostly patches of hair algae, and some bryopsis. Of course when this happens you go into full battle mode. I started feeding less, removed all the sand and trapped detritus, blackouts, techm dosing, phosphate reactor, algae scrubber, more flow, sea hares. The hair algae issue had become systemic and it seemed nothing was going to get rid of it. I had been using some man made reef rock maybe it had absorbed too much, it was quite dense.
So I decided I wanted to try something I don't see a lot of people doing, and that is replacing 100% of the live rock in an established system. I read the reviews of how everyone who received the TBS rock never had any ammonia or cycles so I gave it shot. I ended up ordering 75 lbs from Rich and replaced all the rock in my tank with the TBS rock.
I know its only been a week, but the tank is looking super healthy right now. Corals are more vibrant and the polyps are out more. Zero ammonia readings and parameters are all good. Only bad hitchhiker was a single gorilla crab that I found in the bottom of one of the bags.
About 6-8 months ago the tank started to have issues with nuisance algae, mostly patches of hair algae, and some bryopsis. Of course when this happens you go into full battle mode. I started feeding less, removed all the sand and trapped detritus, blackouts, techm dosing, phosphate reactor, algae scrubber, more flow, sea hares. The hair algae issue had become systemic and it seemed nothing was going to get rid of it. I had been using some man made reef rock maybe it had absorbed too much, it was quite dense.
So I decided I wanted to try something I don't see a lot of people doing, and that is replacing 100% of the live rock in an established system. I read the reviews of how everyone who received the TBS rock never had any ammonia or cycles so I gave it shot. I ended up ordering 75 lbs from Rich and replaced all the rock in my tank with the TBS rock.
I know its only been a week, but the tank is looking super healthy right now. Corals are more vibrant and the polyps are out more. Zero ammonia readings and parameters are all good. Only bad hitchhiker was a single gorilla crab that I found in the bottom of one of the bags.