Went Bare Bottom After DSB-Advice

[wrassie86]

Well after crusing this forum for awile and been on another for the last 6 years,here i am, HELLO!!! Advice here seems to be the best i have seen from some people here.

Anyway after 5 yrs with a DSB it failed me,lost most of my stock over time, before i even knew what was going on.Just could never trace the problem....It was this forum that let me in on OTS and it was indeed the problem and all the symtoms seem to match.
Over the last week i have been removing my DSB and every day that sand was removed the tank seemed healther and corals expanded more.as of now the tank is done "bare bottom" looking to fill the bottom glass with zoo's

What i would like to know is, what do i really watch for now?what should i expect from removing the DSB, bad or good. i have always had the "sponge"and i know or think the tank will be abit touchy now

My set up is as follows (any comments to this would be nice as well)
125g (not drilled)
flow rate 2500 gph aprox
sump is 55g built into custom 15g refuge 4 inch sand and grape C,20g sump and custom trickle housing coral skeletons(ph value?)
3 -175 watt XM"S MH- 2-96 watt 03 attics
Large skimmer
Rock, No idea on wieght the tank is not lacking any,all the way across and 3 qtrs high with plenty of caves and tunals with free flow behind.
Sorry the post is so long i dont want to fail agian infact atleast some of my first corals survived 6-7 years old, but as of now the tank is mostly LPS would like to add SPS but i dont want to see them die......doe's my set up sound good enough????

thanks
Rob

[AttackDonut]

I would hold off on adding anything to your tank until it's had time to adjust to going bare bottom. Perhaps 6 months?

[Shoestring Reefer]

When I yanked my DSB out of my 55, I saw my nitrates rise and then slowly fall. I don't have any numbers in front of me, but they got up to about 5, then hovered around 2 for a while.

My macro algae stopped growing shortly after I switched to a BB. I had cycled my rock in the tank with the DSB, so it probably was supplying the tank with some nutrients. I had one fish, a cardinal that was fed table shrimp once a day. When I put a couple of clowns in QT, I was feeding them a bigger variety of food (frozen mysis, formula 2, some flake) and gave some to the cardinal. My macro started growing again, and my nitrates dropped to 1.0 in a couple of weeks! I think that my tank was actually phosphate limited, and by feeding some different food I gave my macro the phosphate (or some other nutrient) it needed to grow and consume the nitrate!

I recently moved to a 125, so nitrate is at 0.5 because of dilution. I'm feeding about 50/50 table shrimp and other stuff.

[Mrbeachbum2]

when you say bare bottom is that just the glass, or do you have a starboard or what on the bottom?

[Shoestring Reefer]

Mine is glass.

[Snarkys]

what is OTS ?

[ddenham]

old tank syndrome, Kind of like a catch all phrase for when an established tank starts to mysteriously crash.

[Snarkys]

Originally posted by ddenham
old tank syndrome, Kind of like a catch all phrase for when an established tank starts to mysteriously crash.

so there is nothing to test for ? just OTS happens ?

[ddenham]

like I said it's mysterious...Dr Ron says that trace heavy metals build up in rock and sand. He conducted extensive salt mix tests around this idea, consequently he suggested a certain salt was best. Unfortunately many reefers saw really undesireable results due to switching to his mix.

Others (Bomber) say that a DSB is a nutrient and phosphate sponge and eventually "fills up" leaving the reefer with a virtual time bomb at the bottom of their tanks. Hence the trend toward bare bottom tanks or SSB, shallow sand beds.

[rspar]

I changed tanks and sand bed as well 8 months ago. Everything else was the same even transfered the water and went with a 2-3inch bed instead of the 3 1/2 year old ~5inch. It's been almost scarey that I haven't really had to clean anything since. I scrape the glass of coraline bout once a month and during the process remove a few green dots that slowly accumulate but that's about it. I also no longer use a skimmer (a little home made stand screw up) although I plan to in the future. I seriously think 2-3 years is the limit to a sand bed and I plan on changing maybe a 1/3 of it once a year. Who knows a year from now I'll probably be saying something else.

[wrassie86]

OTS for me, started with coral health just sinking,hard corals just fading away zoo's started to not open and waste away.along with tank health just dieing.no matter how many water changes i did they only a very short fix.
I really knew something was wrong when the sand started to have brown cyno.i had a line 2 inches high of algea right above the sand bed on the glass not to mention the same line of algea creeping up my rocks.

But today is the first day without the sand and my corals that are still in good health are opened the biggest i have seen in about 3 mos .i have a green cup coral that has been wasting, half of it is dead now and not put out polyps for about 3 months.Today it put out a few polyps.and it looks like some of the others may make a recocvery.i could'nt be happyer.
Trying to deal with OTS is a real B***ch when your readings are good.and your pulling your hair out trying to fix the problem (i'm almost bald now)
One thing i will never do again is recomend a DSB to anyone unless it is remote.i now have 2 seprate beds under my display that can be changed yearly.