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Old 10-01-2019, 03:57 AM
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Location: Burnaby, B.C.
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Default Greg's 75g Rebuild Round 2

This is a second rebuild for me, but this time it's not because of hardware.
Summer of 2018 I decided I wanted to change up my corals and hence I needed to change all my LR to remove the corals I didn't like.
I bought some man-made LR from J&L back then and stuck it in a tub with powerheads and a heater. My plan back then was to change 1/2 my structures, and do the other half sometime later. Then I sat on that new rock for months.
It then took me until late winter/early spring of 2019 to buy more LR - enough to change out the whole DT and start a complete teardown/rebuild.

It took me from March this year until June to commit to a teardown. I put a spare DT next to the main one and transferred all livestock to the spare.
I then completely cleansed my main DT and prepped it to start over.
During this time, the new LR was sitting in a rubbermaid being dosed with liquid ammonia. I cycled it enough that it was able to process 20mls of pure ammonia in a 12hr period. That is enough to handle more than my 115g system could ever produce.

In mid-July, after transferring the corals I wanted to keep to my re-started DT, I sold my old LR and corals. Then with the empty spare DT full of fish, I ran a course of API General Cure, just 'cause a couple fish appeared to have stringy poop sometimes.

The fish went into the DT late July and all looked well. Corals settled in and started growing, sand was looking clean enough.
A week later, a still had a bacterial bloom. I could see it spinning around from the MP10s. So I put a bag of carbon in the filter sock. 5 days later the bloom was gone and I removed the carbon. FYI, I don't run Carbon or GFO. Haven't since spring of I think 2016.

Couple weeks later I start getting what I thought was a bloom of diatoms. Brown dusty stuff all over the sand and rocks. Turkey basting, sand disturbing and filter sock changes helped.
In the meantime, my corals were looking a bit pale, so I tried to balance NO3 and PO4 with some liquids. This made the brown stuff much worse and I had to clean the sand/rocks/sock a couple times/week to remove it.

I kept this dosing/cleaning battle up until the middle of September. I then decided to try dosing amino acids instead. This started to bring the colors back to my corals within days. 1 more attempt at raising NO3 and PO4 again resulted in brown crap so I stopped dosing for the last time (for now).
I dosed AcroPower @1/2 dose twice/week for 2 weeks.

This brings us to the end of September.
I've decided the brown stuff was diatoms, and has morphed into some kind of bacteria. There is a 'mulm' on the LR. I scrubbed it off with a toothbrush and changed the filter sock 2 days ago, and it has not returned.

So, today, Sept 30th, I've made my mind up to dose MB7 at ONLY the maintenance dose. I dosed 11ml/115g today and will do the same a week from now. I'm planning on only dosing this these 2 times then stop completely. We'll see what results I get where the 'mulm' is concerned.

I will keep dosing AcroPower @20ml/week as I currently do not have enough fish to support the corals' health.

Once I get the DT under control I will populate my QT with some more fish to bring my stock level back to a 'feed the corals' level
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