A year of neglect with a DSB

[treesprite]

This was the tank after setting it up in July of 2020. I had put a DSB in it, and was planning on avoiding the urge to get fish for a while, so the DSB could get established: 

 

 

Try not to look at the "now" picture until you read.

 

I ended up pretty much permanently taking on a sixth full day at work, and just have no time for anything at all, and being able to take leave days was completely impossible due to pandemic staffing issues.  I couldn't bring myself to take down the tank. I had/have nothing expensive or rare in it, and corals that came from captivity dying doesn't affect the ocean reefs. So I decided to just let the tank do its own thing. 

 

I have never done a water change in the tank, since it was set up in July 2020 with all brand new water. My water change Brute still has the same 30 gal (approximately) of saltwater in it, which I discovered yesterday has a salinity of about 40. 

 

I didn't test anything for about a year, not even salinity. Filling RODI for the ATO is the only thing I have been doing.

 

One day, about a year ago, I unplugged the skimmer because I didn't want to be late for work due to adjusting it when it was overflowing. I forgot all about it being unplugged for a while (maybe a week or two?), then just decided to leave it that way. 

 

I don't have fish, so the micro critters own the tank. Initially, I was putting a little food in the tank now and then, but stopped at some point - apparently the food wasn't necessary, because I have a lot more micro critters now than I did a year ago. I started out with about 5 snails, and , without searching around, I saw 3 in there yesterday. I think I had a few tiny hermits - I'm not sure of they are still there. 

 

I changed 4 of my 8 very old bulbs about 5  months ago, because the tank was getting cyano and algae that would go away with  3 days of only ambient light. There has never been any of either cyano or algae in my sump, which has no light. I didn't want to invest in replacing all of the bulbs knowing I was going to continue letting the tank take its own course and not add any corals. The algae is now limited mostly to the teeth of the overflow, the front of the gyre (knockoff) pump, and a green non-slime film on some areas of glass.  The cyano grows real fast,  and it suffocated out most of the corals. It goes completely away within 3 days of ambient only light, and comes back full force within no time when the lights come back on.

 

Yesterday, I decided to shake/blow the cyano off the remnants of the corals. Then I decided to do some quick tests, and wipe off the front glass enough to see in the tank.

 

Salinity was exactly 35 (I think not needing to dump from the skimmer cup is the reason I didn't gradually lose salinity). The salinity in the 14 month old changing water was 40 (it has had a power head running all the time, and a lid with a tiny intentional hole in it).

Ammonia undetectable

Phosphate undetectable

Nitrate about 10

pH 8.0

KH  8

Didn't bother testing anything else.

Given the absence of water changes, I think the DSB kept the water buffered enough to prevent the pH and KH from getting lower. I'm curious about calcium, but too tired to bother testing it.

 

I was kind of hoping the nitrate would be no higher than 5, given the DSB, the lack of fish, and the lack of intentional nutrient import. Possible unintentional factors could be the lights-out die-off of cyano and algae, die-off of coral, and absorption of  ammonia from the 2 cat litter boxes which are in the room. If I had run the skimmer to export nutrients, the nitrate may have been kept lower.  Either way, 10 is not enough to cause cyano and algae in the absence of other contributing factors, and I've never been concerned about nitrate at that level. 

 

So, after not having done a cyano-killing lights-out period for a few weeks, this is what the tank looks like today:

 

 

I feel motivated to finally do a water change in this thing, just need a chance to do it.

 

I'm guessing the water in the Brute is fine, just needs some fresh added to lower the salinity. I don't see any particulate in there, or anything weird. There has been a power head going all this time.

 

My biggest question here is, do folks think doing a 2-day lights-out every week will be okay as a cyano control that is being fueled primarily by the lights? I don't feel like making and maintaining a macro refugium.

 

My other question is, if anyone is about to toss their excess xenia growth, could I please have a bunch of it before you trash it?  Xenia has nutrient export potential, so I'd like to add it to the experimental situation. 

 

If I can get the tank to maintain itself with a negligible nitrate level and without all the cyano (without replacing bulbs), maybe I could eventually put fish in the tank. The first step would be to get the nitrate down. The second step would be to add a tiny bit of food daily, testing the nitrate and phosphate at least once a week for a while. If the food addition, in the absence of water changes, doesn't cause a problem, addition of fish might work out okay (I'm hoping that running a skimmer and growing xenia will be enough to export the nutrients from the food).  

 

I hope chosing to carry on with what I'm doing, under the label of "experiment" instead of "glass box of neglect and regret", will work out well enough to encourage other time-deficient folks who currently think their lack of time is an obstacle to maintaining a nice tank. It would mean being veeerrry patient before adding livestock, but I think it would be worth doing. I think one of the issues a lot of people have with their tanks, is that they put too much livestock in the tank relative to how much time they have for maintainence.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited October 6, 2021 by treesprite
wording

[howaboutme]

Wow! This is so interesting. You have little to no bio load (at least not in the traditional sense), don't feed but yet you have cyano. I agree your lights are to blame but the nutrients have to be there for them to appear. It's not just lights. I'm beginning to think your lack of water changes have something to do with it. However, I've heard people go a long time between wc's and all is good. So I'm stumped. What I'd do to combat cyano is to syphon them out during water changes. Do a lot of them, every couple of days. Turning off lights every so often is not quite sustainable but you can certainly equate your tank to the reefs have a 2-day rain storm with no direct sunlight. Just not sure how realistic that'll be w/o treating the root cause of the cyano. You did change the bulbs, which was my other thought. Good luck!

[treesprite]

I think the input is coming from the litter boxes in the room. A long while back, there was a thread about it. Two of us had issues that were conjectured to be from ammonia in the air caused by the litter boxes. The ammonia settles into the water. I sometimes wonder if covering the tank would make any difference. 

 

Edit to add that it just occurred to me that some covered litter boxes actually come with a little carbon filter pad. I never noticed that those made any difference (as far as humans smelling litter boxes), so I never bothered with them. However, now considering the aquarium, I'm thinking maybe I could come up with a housing for the litter boxes that incorporates enough carbon filtration to significantly reduce the amount of ammonia getting into the air. Might be a good gimmicky invention to sell to aquarists who can't part with their feline friends just to prevent ammonia from affecting their aquariums. My guess is people who want to blame their lazy maintainence habits on their cats would be happy to pay for it.

 

Editing again to add that I just discovered someone else already is marketing an air purifier that sucks air from the litter box to filter it, the. blows it back into the box (drill two holes in the box for the air hoses). Freaking expensive device which doesn't really look big enough to do a good job.  Don't you hate it when you come up with a cool idea for an invention, only to find out someone else beat you to it?  Paul must be a real genius, to have come up with Majano wand before anyone else.

Edited October 7, 2021 by treesprite

[treesprite]

It just occurred to me that an additional minor source of nitrate input, could have been the couple of times I had to use unfiltered tap water for my top-off. It probably amounted to as much as 10 gallons of water - it wouldn't make the entire water volume go up as high as 10, but some fraction of that depending on concentration in the unfiltered tap water. I've never tested the tap water, so I have no idea how high the nitrate, phosphate, etc in it are.

[treesprite]

 

Here's my bad cyano (I did some removal, so tank doesn't look quite as bad):

 

Here's what came from my skimmer after a couple days of use:

 

[treesprite]

I cleaned up a little bit. Here are some of the survivors of being overgrown by cyano for a long time:

 

 

 

So we know that, aside from suffocation to death by cyano, some corals that can survive a year without a water change are euphyllia, candy cane, orange monti, duncan, pavona, various mushrooms, poci, and ugly palys that are supposed to be bright green. 

Edited October 14, 2021 by treesprite

[treesprite]

I messed around with the liverock, to move some from DT to the sump, then I had to reposition a couple big pieces which means I messed up the first couple inches of sand knowing it would release stuff. So now the nitrate is about 40 and the phosphate is, on the color chart, halfway between zero and the first numbered increment of .25.  I can't possibly bring down nitrate that high without a water change, so I'm going to have to do that as soon as I have time. 

 

I wanted to make some space, because I'm going to make a macro section in the DT. I don't want light on all the rock in the sump, so I'm not putting macros down there. One time I had a 38g which had a section on each end full of caulelrpa - some people might think it's weird, but I liked it. I also had a 16g nano with a section of macros on one end which looked really cool (that tank also had a DSB, had no skimming, and had water changes only about 3 or 4 times a year; the nitrate and phosphate stayed at undetectable levels on home test kits, even with fish in the tank and no skimmer). I need to get some macros, so if anyone has some extra, let me know please.

[DaJMasta]

Certainly looking cleaner after the new work and it's really surprising how low the DSB has gotten in the time in between.  It may be that replenishing the sand could help process nitrates, too, as one of the usual benefits of deep sand is the anoxic zone for that last stage dentrification, though it would be a long term thing, so probably doesn't avoid a water change.

My two macros are very slow growers under my lighting (low lights in fry tanks), but I can especially recommend the dragon's breath algae (a type of halymenia, I believe) if you want something that looks pretty.  A deep red base color with growth tips that fluoresce orange under a little actinic lighting.

[treesprite]

I thought when I moved some of the rock around, that I didn't go enough into the sand to cause a big problem, but I was wrong. I meant to do a water change after I did that, but ended up having absolutely no time to do it. Tank had become run over with algae, and some remaining coral has die-off from suffocation. I feel bad about it, but that's the way the story went.

 

I'm going to be moving in the spring, most likely just to a different apartment in the same building. I wanted to move the tank without removing the sand, but the elevators here are so small, I don't know if I could get the tank in without any tilting. I really don't want to waste all of that sand, I don't want the expense of replacing it, and if I do replace it, I'll have t wait forever for it to establish itself. With all that waiting, I'm thinking I may as well go ahead and re-use whatever of the sand isn't black and stinky, and just wait several months for it to cycle through enough to be useable, while the liverock and any living things wait in a separate tank. The move will give me an opportunity to put a macro chamber directly in the DT. It would have to have holes in the wall sufficient for small fish to pass through, otherwise I'm wasting display space. Would be nice if I could get a customer made wave shape to use as a wall for it - maybe I need to learn how to bend acrylic myself so I could afford something like that.

 

 

[howaboutme]

Good luck with your move! I personally think that the risks associated with re-using very old sand outweigh the benefits of establishment. You can always salvage a cup to seed the new sand. However, you'll still have your live rock. Plus, if it helps make the move easier, all the better.