The Upgrade Begins.....

[Miss Wiggle]

Well i`ve spent most of today scraping sand out of the bottom of our old Trigon 350 Oscar tank. filling it with water and bleach and trawling round fish shops Pricing various things up.
we also picked our selves up 50 Kg of argonite sand And this brings on my first question.....
Do i need to wash it and if so how??? with RO?

Also Has any one had any experience with Those bulk packs of clean up crew you get off the internet?

The Mrs will probably follow this up with a long rambleing post and pics

 

[xxBarneyxx]

Not speaking from experience here but from what I read it is a good idea to wash the sand and RO water does a good job of it. Cant rembeer where I read it (probably on here somewhere) but someone suggested using 3-4 buckets. Fill each with RO water and then rinse a small amount of sand starting in bucket one and working down to the last bucket (by which time it should be pretty much clear) then dumping it into the tank.

Cant wait to see photos

 

[Musho3210]

is it live sand?

 

[Mr.September15]

I washed my sand with my garden hose to take out all the dust, just dump it in a bucket. Then fill it up with water, just enough to cover the sand. Then take your hand and mix it with your hand. You should see the unclear water, dump the unclear water. Repeat until the water turns clear.

 

[shibby]

i used a hose for my aragonite as well, took forever and my hands got cold, but took aloud of dust and crud out in process!

 

[Miss Wiggle]

So normal tap water is fine for washing the sand then?

 

[Ter]

heya

like Musho3210 said.. is it live sand? is it in a closed bag with water already in it?
Ter

 

[Miss Wiggle]

nope not live sand, just plain aragonite. were getting cured LR and the sand and LR from our existing tank will be going in so plenty of life!

as Ian said I will undoutedly follow this up with a long rambling post shortly, getting pics on my phone as we go as well so they'll be up soon. Just checking up my finances though to work out how much CUC I can afford to get next weekend.

 

[SkiFletch]

Go ahead and wash that out with a garden hose, kitchen faucet, whatever strikes your fancy

 

[BigIan]

Cheers Ski, Was worried it would get contaminated with trace amounts of copper and other nastys from the tap water....

Were having some major issues in our tank at the moment, the accro hasn't had its polyps out for months now so i moved it the other week when i was cleaning the tank some where with more light and higher flow and now its started bleaching so its gone back to where it was. hope its ok.
Our finger leather was in a rock slide the other month and also is bleaching but appears to be recovering.
And our yellow fiji leather had a load of mushrooms growing right next to it and it also hasn't had its polyps out recently so i`ve cut back the mushrooms and today it seems to be happier

I can`t wait for all the new gadgets i get for this tank...
Bigger skimmer. larger light. Massive power heads.

while were on the subject any one know where to get some T5 UV acctinincs? as all i seem to be able to find are the blue ones.

and any recommendations for skimmers?
i`m thinking a turboflotor 1000. its rated for tanks up to 1000 litres but over skimmings good right? bearing in mind our tank is roughly 350 litres

 

[Matthew5664]

Hi good to hear its all coming along.

With regard to the 'T5 UV' do you mean the true actinic bulbs not the 'blue light' bulbs? if so Aqua Medic do them at a cost also try D-D T5

And the Skimmer, depending on you stocking levels I would go for a Deltec AP600 or the turboflotor 1000, both of which I have heard are good.

 

[SkiFletch]

In regards to the bleaching acropora, have you guys been testing your water for calc/alk/mg/phosphate? Could be an error in one or many of those chemicals causing its poor health. The more I observe mine, the happier they seem when I get the water chemistry right.

 

[Miss Wiggle]

In regards to the bleaching acropora, have you guys been testing your water for calc/alk/mg/phosphate? Could be an error in one or many of those chemicals causing its poor health. The more I observe mine, the happier they seem when I get the water chemistry right.

honestly, not as much as we should. however i have good news, the last two nights the acro's been putting out it's polyps a fair bit which is always a good sign. So I think it's recovering, still pretty white in places but i'm guessing that's gonna take time to fix itself

 

[Miss Wiggle]

well the upgrade got put back a week cos of Ian needing to go to his brothers and build stuff at short notice.

however we're all ready to go for this weekend, the tank's half full now, just taking a while to run off enough RO. Ian's got everything he needs to move the lighting on a temporary basis, he's building a hood for the tank but not just yet as we're well busy with various things so it'll be in a temporary arrangement for a couple of weeks.

will get some pics up when the change over's done.... not that it'll look much at first we're basically moving it with the minimum needed to run it safely for the current livestock, then we'll build up some more equipment and LR etc over the next month or two.

Aside from all this hassle life's pretty good in the wiggle household, we're off to Rhodes for a week at the end of September and after 8 weeks in my new job, my boss is talking about promotions and I had a meeting with the MD last week who rang my boss afterwards to tell him how impressed he was with me. All in all it seems to be going pretty well there!

 

[Miss Wiggle]

well it's been a busy few weeks but the big tank is finally set up! and if i do say so myself it's looking pretty good. done the big change over today. the biggest ball ache was just getting the salinity right. i didn't really think before hand how much salt it would take to mix up 92 gallons of salt water.... simple answer is quite a lot!!

so here's the set up in pictures.....

bit annoyed at myself i forgot to take pics of the 30gal before we stripped it down... but hey ho. so here's some old pics of the 30gal and the 92 gal as freshwater

First thing to do after re-homing the fish was to clean the tank out, we decided to soak it in a 20:1 bleach solution then thoroughly rinse it by filling it and draining it and filling it and draining it etc etc

turns out a 20:1 bleach solution for a 92 gallon tank needs a fair old bit of bleach..... Ian literally emptied the shelf at Asda!

and here's Ian posing while he sorts it out.

so then we filled the tank and drained it many many times which didn't really warrant any pictures

Ian then got carried away and decided to wash the sand at 10 o clock at night which was fairly amusing

then came the longest bit, running off loads of gallons of RO, took forever

we mixed it up 'in tank' obviously before livestock was added

and Ian's done some marvelous DIY, can't wait until we get a proper hood to hide all this junk, every thing's needed though.

then today I moved the LR (along with buying some new) and added everything over to the tank, basically all that's left to do over the next few days is pray we don't get a mini cycle and tinker with the rockwork arrangements and so on. Just left most of the corals on the floor for now, we'll move them up the rockwork gradually to acclimitise them.

it's all a bit cloudy which will settle shortly (i hope!) but you get the general idea.

the skimmer is somewhat dodgily attached at the moment, we're replacing it next week with a nice big one which should also fit better too so we won't have a skimmer on the front of the tank forever at least. and last but not least.... although the tank looks blurry from this angle.... this is now the view from my chair in the living room....... it's ace