help restocking a crashed nano

[prettyflywhiteguy]

hi all, i'm new here..

My first failed attempt at a tank crashed and everything in it died a month ago, i took the corpses out and kept up the photoperiod out of habit.

I was just out of town for a week and my friend who came over to feed my FW tanks left the light on my nano on for the whole time i was gone.. i came home to find a tank literally full of algae, there was like an inch and a half of water column underneath this huge mass of hair algae thatenveloped everything. needless to say i took a dozen or so fistfulls of it out and there's still a ton of it in there, but now there's also a water column...

my real question is this, is it safe to start adding inverts again a month after a crash with 3 weeks stable, good water parms , and the potential to grow a pound of algae in a week?

 

[incysor]

With that kind of algae problem, I'd pull all the algea out you can. Scrub the rocks, and the entire tank, dump the old sand, put in brand new sand, put everything back in the tank, leave the lights off for a month while doing at least one 20% water change a week. After that if the water params were good and no algae I'd start restocking it.

Any critters you add now, even clean up crew are adding fuel for the algae by way of waste. As long as everything is dead anyway I'd get the algae problem under control while it's easy. Once you start adding stuff back in it becomes much more problematic to deal with.

Brian

 

[djconn]

I agree. I would start new and scrub the heck out of the old rock.

Its the best thing to do or else you'll be fighting algae blooms forever.

 

[Phischy]

How many lbs of rock do you have? Is there anything really worth saving? It sounds like you may want to write this entire tankfull of algea off to learning expierence.

If I were you I'd dig a 2' hole in the ground, lug the tank out there and dump everything in, cover hole.

scrape out all algea and clean tank, let sit in adark closet for two weeks to kill off any remaining photo syntheziers.

Now, start fresh, new sand, new rock, cycle and this time learn from mistakes etc...

Or boil your old rock for 15mins to kill everything on it and keep it as base rock.

Point is, int he long run buying new live rock may not be that expensive compared to continually dealing with the algea problem you've got.

 

[prettyflywhiteguy]

thanks all, the rock i have isn't that great, I bought the nano as a half cycled project from a friend who didn't have a damn clue what he was doing and with his tank i got his algae problem, thank god it only sucked 100 bucks from me before it crashed, it could have been a hell of a lot worse :lol:

 

[Sugar Magnolia]

These guys are all correct, unless you take all that rock out and scrub the heck out of it to rid yourself of the majority of algae, you'll be fighting a losing battle. I'm kind of leaning towards Phichy's idea of just starting fresh though.

If you'd rather scrub, once everything is scrubbed and placed back in the tank, run some Phosban or Rowaphos to get rid of any remaining phosphates in the system. Drop in a hefty clean up crew and let them do their thing. FWIW, sally lightfoots are excellent hair algae grazers as are turbo snails. the only prolems with those two additions is that sally's can get very aggresive as they grow and may stalk smaller fish. turbos are just plain big and will bulldoze any small coral frags.

 

[dragon79]

suggestion

I suggest investing in a timer too. I picked one up at target, one of those digital ones. That way if you ever leave, on vacation or wherever, at least you know the timer is monitoring your lights of when they go on and when they go off.

 

[djconn]

Yep, timers are absolutely critical. I also think auto top-off float switches are a must too but some people still resist.

 

[mikeguerrero]

Man I would of loved to see a pic of that nano, probably would of looked like the Hulk in color....

Man you must of been kinda of P.O with your friend for his lack of understanding your tanks needs....

Hope everything is better since then,,, now you are back to mild manner bruce without the green,,,,

Mike

 

[Phischy]

I've heard too many bad things about float switches getting stuck on or off or failing in general. Maybe it's more of an issue with nano's, I just top off every other day and it's no biggie. Maybe this summer it'll be more of an issue.