TANK CRASH: MH Exploded?!

[fishytime]

Originally Posted by Reefer Rob

How will he know how to treat the tank if he doesn't know what caused it? Water changes are a good idea, but he needs to get to the root of problem in order to fix it. JMO of course.

with the variables we were given, it doesnt matter if either A) the bulb leaked toxins into the tank or B) the uv shielding broke or C) it was the maracyn or D) a combination there of......my advice would be the same...... large water changes and removal of anything that may be decaying......He's already running fresh carbon (which should be changed more frequently) so I didnt mention that..... if I were to add anything, it would be to think about picking up some prodibio "Start" or at the very least an emergency dose of "Prime"


my guess is, the dose of maracyn stressed the acros enough that when the bulb broke, irradiating the tank, the stressed acros on that side of the tank started dieing....this caused a chain reaction of acropocaplypse ....I know first hand how a chain reaction can lead to a total crash in a hurry

[sumpfinfishe]

Sorry to hear that, yeah we run so many risks in this hobby but most of the time it really is worth it! Good luck on a healthy rebound

[christyf5]

I cooked my tank a couple years ago when a fish splashed the bulb and it cracked. I have no idea how long the bulb remained on for but I only discovered the reason the tank was looking so weird when I found a piece of glass sitting on one of the rocks. I had no idea the bulbs could still run while being "broken". I ended up losing 2 or 3 fish to severe UV exposure and pretty much one side of the tank. The rock was bleached white as well. It was an eerie look. I didn't have much LPS and what I had was at the bottom of the tank and "less" exposed so there was not much bleaching for them. I lost all the SPS but some of the SPS undersides survived so I left them in the tank. The tank did have a slightly cloudy look to it but it wasn't milky. I would imagine that if you had both zoas and LPS "spewing" they would have attributed to the milky look.

I currently have glass on my lumenarc reflectors (they're designed to hold glass the same as the double ended ones) and will always have glass from now on. I lost a 7 year old scopas tang and a 2 year old powder blue tang that I nursed back to health (fish store rescue, stupid I know) and it was just too traumatic. Of course the fish that did the damage is a big stupidhead and hid in the rocks for most of the time the other fish were swimming around getting hugely irradiated. He continues to splash the reflectors and I can see just how much showing on the glass which makes me happy I got them.

No doubt water changes and carbon are in order, regardless. I'd hold off on the maracyn treatments until you have things stabilized. Did any of the cyano die at least?

[tang daddy]

Aww man sorry to hear about the tank crashing and mh exploding, not a good week for you.
I think it was definately a combo of the bulb and maracyn. Please let me know if there is anything I can do to help, again sorry for your losses man.

When I had a tank crash in march it was along similiar lines, I dosed medication for cyano and removed 1/4 of my sand bed, the clams couldn't take the meds or toxic gases released in the sand bed. All 8 clams died, inturn the tank was cloudy soup all the sps bleached and died aswell.
I lost about 5k in collector pieces of acro and some irreplaceable clams, needless to say I thought that was it and basically out of the hobby, gave it a few months and now slowly restocking my tank.

It's hard to see all the hard work gone in a day but keep your head up bud, things will come turn around for the better soon!

[daniella3d]

Another reason why I don't want SE bulb. I prefer to have DE and have a glass in front of it so if something like that ever happen, it will not fall into the aquarium.

I am always afrais that a splash of water on a hot bulb will make it explode.

But maracin is antibiotics and you should never ever put that in your main tank. If you want to treat for cyano in your main tank use Chemiclean instead as it is an oxydant rather than antibiotics.

Originally Posted by GMGQ

This morning as I was just about to leave for work, i glanced at my tank and it was cloudy. I went over and all the SPS are bleached :S Urchin was DOA in the corner, LPS and zoos all closed up and/or spewing :S

Then I looked up and saw one of my Radium 250W SE MH bulbs was broken! The end of it was missing. It must have happened sometime last night between 6-10pm, because I came home after work and it was fine. I couldnt find the glass in the tank, but I was too busy doing damage control to really look.

I immediately started doing a water change, but I only had 10gal of change water on hand, better than nothing. The skimmer is going crazy, but I've extended the drain tubing into a bucket and letting the foam drip into there while i'm at work. I also changed out the carbon reactor with a fresh cartridge of ROX1.3.

The change water tank is refilling with RO water right now, I'll probably boot home to check on everything at lunch. I'm going to have to make more RO water tonight and do another big water change as soon as I can.

Another reason could be that I dosed 1 packet of maracyn yesterday morning to battle some cyano. I've used it before and had no issues though. I put in 1 packet, and my system is about 80gallons. When I looked at the tank after work yesterday, most of the cyano had turned stringy and was floating away. None of the corals looked affected. So I'm still thinking it's the MH.

Any tips or explanations what the exploded MH did?? The metal bits inside still seem to be in tact.

Thanks everyone.

[Reefer Rob]

How are you making out with this? Any improvement yet?

[ScubaSteve]

Dude, how's the tank going? Let me know if you're needing some frags and I'll see what I've got for ya.

[GMGQ]

Hey guys,

So the tank seems to have stabilized.

- most LPS are fine
- most of the chalice frags were down to their skeletons, but some flesh is growing back
- amazingly most SPS are growing back! Albeit it's only a little bit of flesh regrowing at the base, there are still a few that look pretty dead...
- lost my square back anthias

I actually tried to add a couple of peppermint shrimp a week ago, but my mystery wrasse ate one (damnit! Forgot they like shrimp, it left my other cleaners alone, but that was cuz they were there first, but died during the recent crash). The other peppermint wasn't doing well by the next day. I put it in the frag tank, but it died the next day. So that leads me to believe there's still something funky in the tank... I think I'll have to do another bug water change on the weekend...

Kev,
Do you have any Mille frags? My blue mille and pink mille dont show any signs of recovery yet
;(

[ScubaSteve]

I got a mini colony of blue milli from Ken on the weekend that I could probably cut a piece off for ya. I'll take a look to see if I can make a piece of the green milli monster but it's doing some funny things right now and I'm not sure I want to poss it off at the moment. I've got a few branches of a neat purple acro I've been holding aside for you in case you wanted them and I may have a few small pieces of rainbow stylo as well.