repeating Chemiclean treatment

[asylumdown]

You think the BPs are toast? I debated redirecting the inlet and outlet of the reactor to a bucket of water while I did the treatment but lazy reefer syndrome took over. I really wish I knew what chemiclean was made of so I'd know more about what it's actually doing. It's obviously safe to nitrifiers or it would nuke tanks, but something in it is killing bacteria.

They say on the box that it's specifically not erythromycin succinate, which either means it's not erythromycin at all, or it's just a super sneaky way of saying that it's actually erythromycin estolate or stearate or something like that.

[lastlight]

well soylent green is people... so anything's possible.

[Reef Pilot]

Originally Posted by asylumdown

You think the BPs are toast?

Don't think they are toast, but am quite sure their effectiveness has been interrupted. What's worse, is they can be producing carbon, but with no or very little beneficial bacteria present, could resurrect the cyano again. It for sure, thrives on carbon dosing.

That's why I say you should suspend the BP's for a couple weeks, while you dose your system with MB7 and get the beneficial bacteria fully seeded. Then introduce the bio pellets slowly again, to be sure nothing gets out of whack again.

[toytech]

Ive done the treatment before and had to do a repeat after the 20% waterchange , it was a skimmerless tank only ran carbon and everything was fine , now I didn't have any sps at the time so I cant comment on the effect on them .

[asylumdown]

Well I did the second dose this afternoon after a water change, and I redirected the biopellet reactor to a bucket so that the pellets keep tumbling (I don't want them going stagnant) for the time being. The tank looks cleaner than it has in months right now, the last few patches of cyano look pretty dead but I want to be sure it's as dead as I can make it.

My elegance coral retracted half it's tentacles for a few hours after I dosed a second time, but otherwise there appears to be no negative reaction. I'll do a second water change on Thursday, change the GFO again, fire up the skimmer and as soon as it stops going insane I'll start dosing the MB7. We shall see if this combined with my other maintenance measures clears this problem up for good.

[asylumdown]

Well I only did the second treatment for 24 hours. A couple of my LPS were looking particularly unhappy, and my two gorgonians shrivelled up beyond recognition. A few of my larger colonies also retracted 90% of their polyps by the morning of the third day so last night I did another large water change, changed my GFO, and fired up the skimmer. It went crazy for a few hours emptying directly in to a drain doing another partial water change on the tank, but by 10pm when I went to bed it had died way down so I did the first dose of MB7. I put half directly in the BP reactor, though I'm not sure how effective it will be recirculating in the bucket, and the other half in the display.

This morning I was able to turn the skimmer back up to almost where I used to have it set, and I added a mesh bag full of carbon to my filter sock to mop up the final traces of chemiclean and any organics that are floating around in the tank as a result of the treatment. I also did the second dose of MB7.

As of this moment, my sand is as white and sparkling as the day I put it in, and there's not a so much as a speck of cyano or dinos anywhere in the tank. Once the skimmer has had a chance to get back to normal I'm going to do another round of sand bed cleaning in the places the cyano used to be the worst. Here's hoping I've licked this problem for a while at least.

[Delphinus]

TBH I'm a little surprised you felt the need to do a second treatment so soon. Unless I'm mistaken as to when you did round #1. Honestly, cyano being one of the most successful lifeforms on the planet (here long before us, will be here long after us I'm sure), it's going to take some time to recede, but it almost 100% always does after a treatment - just give it some time.

[asylumdown]

Really the only reason I did a second one right away was because I've done a chemiclean treatment once before on this tank when the cyano issue was much less severe, and the cyan began to return in the same spot the same week, leading me to believe that I didn't get it all in 48 hours. I wanted to really make sure it was dead. It was probably overkill, but nothing seems the worse for wear today. All the corals that were shrivelled are looking normal now.

It's not that the cyano was ever really *that* bad, but I'm a neurotic perfectionist, and I didn't like the trajectory things seemed to be on. Someone standing in front of the tank, at a glance, would only have noticed a small patch of it in one spot on the sand, but when you got up close and started looking at the rocks, you started to realize that there was way more of it than it at first seemed. Also, anywhere that my corals would touch and fight, there'd be thick tufts of it, which seemed to be preventing the tissue from being able to heal after I trimmed back offending branches.

On a side note, maybe it's just a placebo effect, but when I looked up from my computer a few minutes ago I thought "hot diggity that water is clear!" It's like practically glittering. It's making me think that I should run GAC more often, this is only the second or third time I've ever put it in.