Although you seem to be leaning toward starting over anyway (I don't blame you) I'll finish this up for completeness.
Quote:
Originally Posted by taricha
Here's exactly what I would do in your shoes:
1. Siphon out all the dinos you can: Replace water as needed with plain Instant Ocean salt mix (not reef crystals). Do it thoroughly, maybe it'll be the only time you have to do this.
2. Take a strip or two of filter floss or dense mesh netting or anything else with a lot of surface area and attach it right in the flow in front of a powerhead and under good lighting. It'll be an Osti magnet. Pull it out daily (or 2 or 3 times a day if you want) and rinse the brown dusting out under tap water, and replace the filter.
3. Get a UV (make that 2 UV's - 2nd one for later) slow flow is better. Hook up one UV so that the output of the UV dumps right at the skimmer intake. Run skimmer wet. Doesn't have to be fancy. petsmart carries a brand that should do the trick.
4. Run activated carbon, and replace every day for the first week.
5. Stop Zeo system, Coral snow, any other carbon dosing etc. Pull out GFO if any.
6. Set up an algae sump/fuge from scratch (if you have one already - nuke it with bleach/peroxide/whatever). Make certain that all water from the display that goes to the fuge goes through your slow flow UV + skimmer first before getting to the algae growing area.
7. Put up an Algae Turf Scrubber (ATS). See threads on the setups, but don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. If you don't have the stuff to make it exactly to the recommended specifications, fine. Add flow and blast the fuge with several 100W LEDs at 2700k (warm white) for 18hr/day and then you can improve it to get it closer to recommended, but start the algae growth ASAP.
8. Get algae to throw in the fuge: Macroalgae of any kind, great, microalgae too. If you can get chaeto or caulerpa, or anything else green and fast growing, great. Buy locally, beg local reefers etc. Order if necessary. More is better.
9. Test N & P - don't let either get to undetectably low. Add the plainest least complex thing like NaNO3 or KNO3 and similar for P, or if not available - mysis frozen table shrimp etc. - as necessary to get measurable amounts of both. Avoid fancy fish foods that have all manner of vitamins and micronutrient enrichments. Personally, I'd aim for 5-10ppm NO3, .05-.10 PO4. Yes, I know that P level inhibits stony coral growth, but I guarantee you won't see any stony coral growth until dinos are gone anyway.
...all that should be done on day 1 if possible :-)
10. Try to acquire pods that you can dump in the tank on day 4.
11. Day 4: After 3 days (post-siphon) of using the filter floss dino magnet you should have significantly fewer dinos. Do a 3 day blackout in the tank. Run the fuge lights still at 18 or 20hrs/day. If your UV/wet skimmer are not doing their job, then algae and ATS in the fuge will get covered in dinos (bad).
12. At the start of the blackout, add pods to the display tank. If there's lots of pods in the algae fuge, you can suck or scrape some out and dump in as well. don't take algae from fuge and put it in the Display. It'll just die in darkness, and if you put it back in the fuge it'll bring dinos with it. [edit: if acquiring live rock, this is the step where I'd add it]
13. Make sure you are (carefully) cleaning the skimmer every day or two. Keep it running efficiently.
...To be continued (Post Blackout finishing touches)
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Post Blackout Finishing Touches (week 2)
14. Bring lights up however slowly you need to keep from shocking corals.
15. Add the 2nd UV right in the display tank. So you have one that circulates in the tank, and one that acts in combo with wet skimming to be a dino gate to keep them off your algae fuge/ATS.
16. Add a few plugs of macroalgae from the fuge (or get some more from somewhere) and place them directly on the sandbed. This is in part for more direct nutrient competition, but mostly to really ramp up the microfauna in the sand bed. Chaeto is my favorite for this.
17. If you have spots of cyanobacteria/red slime - cut the pumps off for a minute or two and squirt 1/2 ml to a ml of H2O2 through a tube right onto the trouble spots. Keep your total peroxide use under 1ml/20 gal per day and you should see no widespread effects.
18. At the end of week 2, if dinos are invisible in the tank - only showing up as brown dusting on the floss filter, and the ATS is getting good growth you can pull the macroalgae out of the display tank. You could occasionally dose phyto here to keep the microfauna going, but go easy with it.
19. You can reduce UV use to one unit run only at night.
20. If all goes well declare cautious victory.