alten78
10/03/2016, 09:52 AM
As the title says, I moved to a new setup but it couldn't have gone much worse.
A long story long... I bought a same sized setup off of a local guy that had just nicer things than I do for a steal, that and we were putting a new floor down and repainting the walls. The new tank and stand we temporarily setup 5 feet away from the current setup but I didn't setup the whole thing, just planned on using the display as a holding tank for a few days while the walls and floor went down. Was able to use most of the water from the old setup but ended up adding 15 gallons of fresh made. Only transferred fish, coral, and rock, the new setup was going to be bare bottom.
Everything seemed to be perfectly fine for three days, had a heater, powerheads, just no lights. Cleaned out the old tank, removed sand and just hosed it down, didn't clean it anything other than water. Brought it back in and proceeded to moved water and livestock back to old tank in order to move the new one to its final location. A lot of moving of animals and not the ideal situation but I didn't have anything else to put them in for more than a day. This last move was done Tuesday night, Wednesday morning all looked well still, fed the fish and off to work I went.
Came home for a half day of work to finish the job. As soon as I walked in the door I saw the tank super cloudy white, half the fish were already dead and the remaining were half floating and gasping, most of the coral appeared fine but some were RTN'ing. I only had another 20g of NSW mixing so I was nowhere near prepared to change out a large amount of water and had no idea what the hell was happening to the current water but clearly things were dying fast.
I ended up first freaking out, then adding the nsw to the new tank in place and about 1/3 of the old tank water because I still had no idea what was in the water causing the melt down. I already did have gac running before so I just kept it going. So now the remaining 5 fish are in and can see them improving fairly quickly, whew. Kept making water as fast as possible but that took several hours, moved all the coral and most rocks over and thankfully the fish appeared to be perfectly healthy as if nothing happened.
Coral on the other has be almost all doom and gloom. Anything that wasn't a decent sized colony is gone and now those colonies and hardier pieces are STN'ing. I'm not dosing anything anymore, just trying to keep things stable as possible but its rough just watching everything slowly die off.
Clearly this has been waaaaay too much stress for these delicate creatures and a process that I thought would have been easy to do that is ending in disaster. Any thoughts going forward would be appreciated in order to try to keep the rest from dying off.
Current parameters:
SG 1.026 (refrac)
Alk 9.0 dkh (hanna usually kept at 7-8)
Calc 480 (salifert)
No3 5ppm (salifert)
PO4 0 (hanna)
Temp 78 (apex)
A long story long... I bought a same sized setup off of a local guy that had just nicer things than I do for a steal, that and we were putting a new floor down and repainting the walls. The new tank and stand we temporarily setup 5 feet away from the current setup but I didn't setup the whole thing, just planned on using the display as a holding tank for a few days while the walls and floor went down. Was able to use most of the water from the old setup but ended up adding 15 gallons of fresh made. Only transferred fish, coral, and rock, the new setup was going to be bare bottom.
Everything seemed to be perfectly fine for three days, had a heater, powerheads, just no lights. Cleaned out the old tank, removed sand and just hosed it down, didn't clean it anything other than water. Brought it back in and proceeded to moved water and livestock back to old tank in order to move the new one to its final location. A lot of moving of animals and not the ideal situation but I didn't have anything else to put them in for more than a day. This last move was done Tuesday night, Wednesday morning all looked well still, fed the fish and off to work I went.
Came home for a half day of work to finish the job. As soon as I walked in the door I saw the tank super cloudy white, half the fish were already dead and the remaining were half floating and gasping, most of the coral appeared fine but some were RTN'ing. I only had another 20g of NSW mixing so I was nowhere near prepared to change out a large amount of water and had no idea what the hell was happening to the current water but clearly things were dying fast.
I ended up first freaking out, then adding the nsw to the new tank in place and about 1/3 of the old tank water because I still had no idea what was in the water causing the melt down. I already did have gac running before so I just kept it going. So now the remaining 5 fish are in and can see them improving fairly quickly, whew. Kept making water as fast as possible but that took several hours, moved all the coral and most rocks over and thankfully the fish appeared to be perfectly healthy as if nothing happened.
Coral on the other has be almost all doom and gloom. Anything that wasn't a decent sized colony is gone and now those colonies and hardier pieces are STN'ing. I'm not dosing anything anymore, just trying to keep things stable as possible but its rough just watching everything slowly die off.
Clearly this has been waaaaay too much stress for these delicate creatures and a process that I thought would have been easy to do that is ending in disaster. Any thoughts going forward would be appreciated in order to try to keep the rest from dying off.
Current parameters:
SG 1.026 (refrac)
Alk 9.0 dkh (hanna usually kept at 7-8)
Calc 480 (salifert)
No3 5ppm (salifert)
PO4 0 (hanna)
Temp 78 (apex)