We poured a microfinish concrete top coat.
While this was going on, unbeknownst me one of the laborers took the wet dry vac which was full of concrete dust and dumped it into the outdoor sump. I have no idea what he was thinking, or why he would think a tank of water was a trash can, but he did it.
But the tank was bagged, so we had no idea what had been done. It wasn't until I noticed that the tank had a foot tall head of foam on it that the damage was done.
Massive water changes were done, but it was another disaster, losing most of my fish and corals.
The floor turned out fantastic, but the cost was astronomical.
I spent several months doing massive water changes to try to stabilize the tank, but it just wasn't coming back to life. I couldn't keep corals, and I couldn't keep but the most basic of fish.
At this point the economy took a down turn and I couldn't afford to restock the tank and restocking wasn't an option as it wasn't sustaining much life. So with a few yellow tangs and some blue damsels, I turned the tank off for the most part.I shut off
the tunzes, the lights, the skimmer, the reactors. I left the return pump on and the auto topoff and walked away from the tank. The tank 'ran' like this for almost 2 years.
Then in 2010 I was diagnosed with kidney cancer. Planning for my recovery I knew I wanted my tank running again in the house. The tank was a brown dingy algae den. The only thing alive in the tank was the yellow tangs and blue damsels, and some button polyps.
I drained the entire system. Caught the fish and moved them into a bucket. Then brought the pressure washer into the house and used the pressure washer to blow all the algae off the rocks in the tank. I then used tap water and filled the system back up.
I put the fish back in. Turned the equipment back on and the lights.
A few weeks later I started adding fish and corals to the tank. The fish did well but corals died within 24 hours. I spent months changing water, running filters, changing carbon, but could not get corals to live in the tank.
SPS would go in the tank looking good and in 24 hours the tissue would be hanging off the coral like a tattered flag. Softies would just slowly melt away. I tested for everything, and couldn't find any issues. Everyone I spoke with assummed it was
residual concrete dust. So I slowly started reducing the size of the system. I took my geo thermal tank offline. I took the outdoor sump offline. But no changes.
The outdoor sump had a 6" sand bed in it. So several people said that the sand bed had gone foul. So I emptied the sand bed. The fish population continued to grow but corals were still an issue.
I updated my ozone, and my UV. But no changes.
I reached out to my friends in the hobby for ideas. Finally someone asked me about my salt. I had been using a pallet of the same salt for the past couple of years.
So doing something that I thought I would never do, I went to Petco and bought 4 buckets of Instant Ocean salt and did a massive water change. A week later I added some corals to the tank... and a week later they were still alive.
So I did a few more water changes and started putting the volume back into my system. I added a 5' fluidized sand filter to my outdoor sump.
So this brings us to the end of 2011. I had a healthy collection of fish and a tank that could support corals again. 2012 was the year to stock the tank. And being a good reefing addict, that's exactly what I did.
Being eager to have a heavily coral stocked tank, I wasn't interested in frags, I wanted colonies. But the availability of colonies was not the easiest thing to come by. So I started with Maricultured corals, and lots of them.
And I kept adding more and more...
