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Youngsilver
03/04/2006, 12:47 AM
So, I tested the water in the 300g fish only tank at Kyoto japanese steak house here in stillwater tonight. The nitrate vial went maroon ...twice. It has 50-100 lbs of LR, A wet dry, and no skimmer. Livestock includes a 10"california ray, a 15-20" snowflake eel and a 12" dogface puffer. I have agreed to start caring for the tank, as a part time job, but wow haha. I thin it needs a 100% tear down and 100% new water, a fuge/skimmer setup, LR, a DSB and and and and. Travis is going to cook me up some DIY rock, other then that, what are some opinions out there? Thanks in advance...sigh :)

Russ Braaten
03/04/2006, 12:27 PM
Don't go so drastic, just do water changes of 10% or 20% on a weekly basis and clean the filters and remove the dry part of the wet dry. You can fill the dry side of the filter with rock rubble. If you do too much you will kill off everything. Forget about the DIY rock unless they need it for looks.

Chrash236 has a lot of really clean rock for $3.50/lb. They can use another 50 to 100 pounds.

Remove any bio wheels too. If the DSB is really dirty you can use a sand sifting siphon to clean a small area of the dsb each time you do a water change. Do not try to do the whole bed at once, Just a small area. This keeps the bio system of the bed mostly undisturbed but for the area you cleaned. The cleaned part will be in good shape by the next water change and you can do the next area.

Don't shock the tank by doing too much at once.

Now the main part. Stop the people from overfeeding the tank!!

Youngsilver
03/05/2006, 07:07 AM
haha, travis and I changed 150g today over about 8 hours, and surprisingly, the nitrates where still off chart.

Russ Braaten
03/05/2006, 12:39 PM
you ignored me huh? :)

captbunzo
03/05/2006, 01:22 PM
I'd say that the 150g water change was a GOOD thing. I'd probably again at least once, maybe twice. Give the tank a couple of weeks before you do it again. You might check out the Remote Deep Sand bed thread over in Anthony Calfo's old forum (All Things Salty) or in his new forum over in you know where.

Keep in mind that the improvements you are looking for are going to take a lot of work, time, and several months worth of calendar (like 3-6 before nitrates are remotely reasonable on a consistent basis.

I'd say more Live Rock in the tank is a great idea.

Russ Braaten
03/05/2006, 02:18 PM
Youngsilver,

What is in the wetdry system now? ...and have you done anything to it yet?

captbunzo
03/05/2006, 03:02 PM
Oh yes, and do something about that waste-of-space wet dry. I've looked at it and think it can be, pretty reasonably, converted over to a nice sump with a refugium.

And get them to spend some money on a good protein skimmer.

Youngsilver
03/06/2006, 04:45 AM
The weet dry is approximately a 29g in size, custom made from acrylic. it is devided into 3 equal sections, left 2 are filled w/ bio balls fed by 1 overflow each. Right one is empty, then a bulkhead on the side, going to a little giant (dont know size) external pump. Now get this... the return line on the little giant is "T"ed off immediately above the output with 1/2 pvc...hmm head pressure.. haha. The problem there is that there isnt enough room behind the tank to get anything bigger back there.

As far as the removing the bioballs go, I am going to wait until we can find hiim a skimmer, so that we dont end up with ammonia and nitrites in the system also.

The sand bed is large peices of crushed coral, so we are trying to hunt down 300lbs of oldcastle or southdown, but currently we cant find any.When we get sand, we are going to remove old and add new in small sections weekly, hopefully we wont have to buy the LFS brand, $300 could buy a skimmer :)

Travis L. Stevens
03/06/2006, 10:09 AM
Okay, I'm going to try to condense anything and clear up any possible confusion.

Kyoto Before: It is a 300g reef ready tank with dual overflows located in the corners and sits on an old metal stand that is skinned in wood. The drains are two 1.5" pipes to a trickle filter. The trickle filter is in three stages and I am guessing that it is approximately 36"x12"x18" and has a maximum capacity of roughly 30 gallons. Each chamber is equal in size. The first two are filled with bioballs. Each chamber gets one overflow drain trickling through it. The return pump is a Little Giant of unknown size that has a 1/2" return outlet. After doing some looking up on www.lgpc.com I came to the conclusion that the return pump is a measly 500gph. This is immidiately "T"ed off to go to two seperate Loc-Line Return nozzles. This is the ONLY water flow they have. No powerheads or anything. The substrate is about 3 inches or so of crushed coral and about 50lbs of "rock" if we are lucky. Some of it is plastic rock that you would get for a freshwater aquarium. It's inhabitants are a (approximate) 10" Dog Face Puffer, 18"-24" Snowflake Eel, and a 8" diameter California Round Ray. No clean up crew. Fish are fed about 1oz of food a piece nightly :eek1: It's water parameters were 0 Ammonia, 0 Nitrites, Unkown Nitrates (I speculate >500ppm), 8.0 pH (Most likely due to lack of O2 from low flow and high CO2 from large tank mates), 9 dKH, and 380 ppm Calcium. Temperature was 78*F and specific gravity was 1.028. It was apparent that we had one heck of a job to do.

Proposed Goals: Most likely there will be a day that we will have to go up there when they are closed and do a complete over haul of this tank. But for now, our goal is to reduce nitrates and getting other water parameters a little more in line ASAP without shocking the fish. Our ultimate goals which will take months to do is to replace crushed coral substrate with a DSB for denitrification and allow the ray to bury himself, remove bioballs which is an obvious source of nitrates. Add a lot more live rock, but only enough so there is room for the ray to swim. Add additional lighting to increase appeal and possibly add some hardy soft corals or corallimorphs for more visual appeal. Add a clean up crew and cross our fingers. We are thinking if we had more rock, there would be more room for a clean up crew to hide and not be eaten. Change the trickle filter into a sump/refugium. The refugium would consist of a very deep sandbed, live rock rubble, and chaetomorpha algae as an algal scrubber. Increase pump size for additional flow. We may have to move the tank out an inch or so if we get to do an overhaul. Add powerheads if possible. Hidden Tunzes/Seios would be sweet. Train employees how to properly take care of the tank and not overfeed. Attempt to plumb an auto-top off system. We might not be able to do that because it would have to be plumbed from the back of the kitchen, in the walls or ceiling, and then to the tank. I think that covers it. DSB, more rock, sump/refugium, increased flow. Alsmost forgot. Add a skimmer, too.

What Was Done: Oh boy, was this an endeavor, but I loved every minute of it. First of all, we cleaned. Period. Under the stand, the outside of the tank, the inside, on top, the lights, you name it. We then did an emergency 150g water change. We had to resort to dechlorinated tap water, but in future smaller additions we will use his RO/DI unit more often. Plus it's only a FOWLR tank and there isn't a cleanup crew. And we changed his two OLD 36" T8 NO bulbs to 2 new 48" T8 NO 6500K bulbs. His ballast could power it! He also has a single ballast for a single 24", 36", or 48" T8 NO bulb. It currently power an OLD 36" bulb. Walmart didn't have a 6500K 36" bulb at 3AM, so we skipped it this time. We plan on getting replacement waterproof end caps and doing 3 48" NO 6500K bulbs until we can get a nice lighting setup later. It doesn't sound like much, but it was almost like a whole new tank when we were done. The only bad part is, when we first tested the Nitrates, it was off the chart on three different test kits tested multiple times. The highest reading of a test kit was 200 ppm. It passed the last color and maxed out in a matter of a few seconds. You needed to wait 60 seconds for an accurate reading. The worst part is, after doing the 50% water change, the nitrates were still maxed out. At least it took about 5-10 seconds for the Nitrates to max out this time instead of a couple of seconds. If I had to guess what the nitrates are actually, I would say that it was easily 500 ppm. It wouldn't surprise me if it was 750 ppm. Truthfully, I don't know how these fish are alive, active, and growing. I guess it goes to show you how adaptable fish are. Our plan is to do 50-150g water changes every weekend until we can get the nitrates to a readable level.

***Here is a little something fun. Little Giant Pump Company is located in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma! I had no idea!

schlecht13
03/06/2006, 11:35 AM
I would definately have to agree with the large water changes. Also I am relativley sure that high SG is better when high NO3 is present. Fish are able to cope better. I can't immediately cite research on this but I will try to find it. In other words, careful of lowering the SG too much until the NO3 is lower otherwise fish may lose coping ability. Couldn't resist offering. Thanks.

Travis L. Stevens
03/06/2006, 11:41 AM
Youngsilver's girlfriend took some pictures of us working on the tank. I'm sure i can dig up a picture of what it looked like before, and I can go take a picture of what it looked like after we were done. It's pretty amazing. I think it's just the lights that did most of the visual effects. I don't know the fish well enough, but to me they looked more active after the water change. The snowflake eel hid most of the time until we started adding new water in. By the time we were leaving, he was swimming about the tank. BUT it was also night time, so it just might be its normal time to come out. To me the fat, lazy puffer even seemed to be a little more alert and breathing seemed to not be as labored. The stingray just kept swimming in circles begging to be fed.

pwhitby
03/06/2006, 01:00 PM
Travis, is the tap water nitrate free? you may have added some back by going that route

Travis L. Stevens
03/06/2006, 01:08 PM
<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=6893168#post6893168 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by pwhitby
Travis, is the tap water nitrate free? you may have added some back by going that route

It's definitely under 5ppm. It was trace if any because it didn't read to the first notch on any test kits. At the time, anything was better than what was in there. The first 50g was RO/DI only, but it was taking WAY too long. It was pouring out at about a .75-1g a minute. We couldn't afford to sit there all night. We were out of there at 5:30 AM as it was :D

Youngsilver
03/06/2006, 03:30 PM
I think that I could have saved all the saltcreep we cleaned off and used it in my tank for a year! :P

Travis L. Stevens
03/06/2006, 04:04 PM
<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=6894238#post6894238 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by Youngsilver
I think that I could have saved all the saltcreep we cleaned off and used it in my tank for a year! :P

NO KIDDING!!! You guys wouldn't have believed how much there was on there.