Aftermath of 3 weeks in Bali

[chef]

Well,i'm sure most of you know, going on vacation for 23 days and leaving my tank to a subpar babysitter is going to have painful results. I came home to a medium crash,losing all coral and lots of algae. After a major cleaning regime, things are slowly recovering. My question is will my liverock return to its former glory? its lost alot of coraline and is relatively brown. Oh yea, the diving in bali was freaking amazing. Iguess its the price i pay.

[Maverick00]

Good to hear you had a good time! pics??
Sry about the tank, I had a similar situation last year and lost a bunch of sps, everything bounced back with regular w/c and gfo. Im already biting my nails, i leave again in july for another 5 weeks. The apex dashboard should provide some form of stress relief.

[Jordan_Oreo]

This happen to me, I was away on vacation for a few weeks to come home to my tank a mess... I thought it was all done but after water changes every week it all came back ! just stay ontop of water changes it will do wonders.

Cheers

[asylumdown]

Is the LR brown because stuff on it has died or because it's covered in dines or diatoms, or some other such algae? If it's just covered in grossness, it will be back to it's former glory as soon as the tank issues are corrected and the algae is gone. If the coralline has died, it will come back, but it might take a month or two to look the way you remember.

I am constantly amazed at how resilient the things that are in our tanks are. We always think they're so fragile (and relative to a house plant they clearly are), but they're just as robust as any other living thing in their native environment. I've had corals that I thought were completely dead recover from a single polyp that survived at the edge of it's encrusted base before, and my pico tank gets 100% water changes with water that's a few degrees colder than what it's used to every week, and yet that tank thrives.

You'll pull through! Now it's time to start scouring the net for some of those species you saw in Bali and seeing which ones can eventually live in your tank!

[daniella3d]

This make us realize how dependant those systems are on proper care. We are so responsible for it.

I do water change once a month so I guess not much could go wrong if I was going away for a few weeks.

I returned from a 10 days trip last week and things were A1. My tank sitter who knows nothing about reef aquarium was coming to feed the fish and corals every other day.

Do you know why your tank got to that point? too much feeding?

Surely not the lack of water change because a tank can go many months without water change and still be just fine, so what caused it?

Also do you dose with a dosing pump for calcium, alkalinity? what about top off? that really help keep the tank stable during vacations.

I have a reef angel controler with wifi and I can monitor the temperature, PH, salinity etc and what's ON and what's OFF from the Iphone app any time of the day, plus I have a web cam. That really help too. I have my top off water on a huge baril of 20 gallons of water, so that's plenty enough for 3 to 4 weeks. I also made sure that I had my gallons of calcium and KH fill up to max so that it would last a month.

[SeaHorse_Fanatic]

It was likely overfeeding that caused it to crash.

Overfeeding is far more likely to cause a crash during a vacation than anything else.