A few of you may remember my posts from May when my 180 crashed while I was out of town for a wedding. The long and short of it is that I left for the wedding on Friday and trying to be a good husband I turned off my return pump so my dear wife would not have to fill my tank everyday with RO water. I moved my heater up to my display thinking things would be ok for 3 days while I was gone. Well I couldn't have been more wrong. I had a Vlamingi Tang (I'm pretty sure) that must have died on the Friday I left. My wife went to feed the fish on Saturday night and discovered that all the fish had died. The smell was unbarable. She called me about 10pm that night to let me know. By turning off my return and the fish dying the resulting ammonia levels killed everything. Sunday morning I asked her to look in the tank, specifically at my coral, she said they had all died as well. When I got home Monday I could smell my tank from the minute I walked in the door. This is what the tank looked like when I got home...
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In total I think around 25 fish, over 150 corals, and two years of time down drain in 3 days because of a stupid error. The first thing I did after completely freaking out and cursing the world was to clear out all fish I could find and to drain and refill my tank. I almost puked several times because of the smell. I had to turn off the AC because my tank is in the basement and the fan was blowing the stink throughout the house. I opened up both windows and set up 4 fans blowing out. It took 2 weeks for the stink to go away. I filled my GFO canister with ammonia chips and I drained and refilled my tank 2 more times as fast as I could make the water. After that I did 30 gallon water changes daily for a week. Finally, I could turn my skimmer on without it exploding. It took another month of biweekly 30g water changes before the amonia finally went down to 0. It took a couple more weeks into July to cycle the tank and then I had vacation at the end of July so I didn't start adding anything back in until August. I purchased the spectrapure ATO and hooked it up. Now I can leave town for a few days without anything for my wife to do but feed the fish. I reaquascaped (if that's a word) my tank and removed all the sugar sand and replaced it with crushed coral (I got tired of the sand storms). I'm now up to 10 coral and 3 fish. I have long way to go, but I am happy to be adding to my tank once again. Anyway, for those interested I wanted to give an update and to thank everyone who has helped out with advise and support. MASC is a great organization that I am proud to be a member of.
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In total I think around 25 fish, over 150 corals, and two years of time down drain in 3 days because of a stupid error. The first thing I did after completely freaking out and cursing the world was to clear out all fish I could find and to drain and refill my tank. I almost puked several times because of the smell. I had to turn off the AC because my tank is in the basement and the fan was blowing the stink throughout the house. I opened up both windows and set up 4 fans blowing out. It took 2 weeks for the stink to go away. I filled my GFO canister with ammonia chips and I drained and refilled my tank 2 more times as fast as I could make the water. After that I did 30 gallon water changes daily for a week. Finally, I could turn my skimmer on without it exploding. It took another month of biweekly 30g water changes before the amonia finally went down to 0. It took a couple more weeks into July to cycle the tank and then I had vacation at the end of July so I didn't start adding anything back in until August. I purchased the spectrapure ATO and hooked it up. Now I can leave town for a few days without anything for my wife to do but feed the fish. I reaquascaped (if that's a word) my tank and removed all the sugar sand and replaced it with crushed coral (I got tired of the sand storms). I'm now up to 10 coral and 3 fish. I have long way to go, but I am happy to be adding to my tank once again. Anyway, for those interested I wanted to give an update and to thank everyone who has helped out with advise and support. MASC is a great organization that I am proud to be a member of.
Tank looks like its coming well and I really like the new scape too! I dont know if you want some softies corals/rocks but I still have some stuff in my garage tank you can have if you would like. LMK if you want to come by. Glad to see you are making the come back, that quite the feat, good job!
