Hi all,
I just rejoined BAR and wanted to get a new tank journal up and running around my Red Sea Max 250.
A little background/history before getting into the tank reboot.
I got started with a ~20g nano tank back in 2012. Looking back, its kind of funny because I probably had the MOST success in the hobby with that tank despite doing an all around awful job actually taking care of the tank. I never tested the water, I never dosed anything, I regularly forgot to do water changes.
Here is a picture I dug up from ~2014.
When my wife and I bought our first house, I got the go ahead to upgrade. That is when I bought my current tank - a second hand Red Sea Max 250, which is about ~66 gallons total volume.
I migrated everything over and things were good for a while.
But then, I started to get issues that for the life of me I could not figure out. I did a mail in water test, etc -- nothing jumped out yet everything went south.
Some of the chalice corals I had been keeping just fine for years started to have tissue recede. And my tank became completely overrun with nasty red turf algae.
I posted a bunch of times on reef central, etc but could never figure out a solution for the turf algae. During that time, basically every coral in the tank more or less died.
So I opted to go nuclear, I removed all the sand, I removed 100% of the rock work and gave it all an acid bath. I effectively hit the restart button on the tank.
At that point, I was also building a new office in my back yard and knew I would be moving the tank into there once construction was done. So I basically let the tank sit and "mature" for the past year with just fish, rock, and my 2 surviving corals -- a small colony of sunny D zoas and a rock with some clinging to life blueberry blasto merletti's (from Legendary Corals!).
Which is where thing are now! (To be continued in the next post)
I just rejoined BAR and wanted to get a new tank journal up and running around my Red Sea Max 250.
A little background/history before getting into the tank reboot.
I got started with a ~20g nano tank back in 2012. Looking back, its kind of funny because I probably had the MOST success in the hobby with that tank despite doing an all around awful job actually taking care of the tank. I never tested the water, I never dosed anything, I regularly forgot to do water changes.
Here is a picture I dug up from ~2014.
When my wife and I bought our first house, I got the go ahead to upgrade. That is when I bought my current tank - a second hand Red Sea Max 250, which is about ~66 gallons total volume.
I migrated everything over and things were good for a while.
But then, I started to get issues that for the life of me I could not figure out. I did a mail in water test, etc -- nothing jumped out yet everything went south.
Some of the chalice corals I had been keeping just fine for years started to have tissue recede. And my tank became completely overrun with nasty red turf algae.
I posted a bunch of times on reef central, etc but could never figure out a solution for the turf algae. During that time, basically every coral in the tank more or less died.
So I opted to go nuclear, I removed all the sand, I removed 100% of the rock work and gave it all an acid bath. I effectively hit the restart button on the tank.
At that point, I was also building a new office in my back yard and knew I would be moving the tank into there once construction was done. So I basically let the tank sit and "mature" for the past year with just fish, rock, and my 2 surviving corals -- a small colony of sunny D zoas and a rock with some clinging to life blueberry blasto merletti's (from Legendary Corals!).
Which is where thing are now! (To be continued in the next post)