rdwilson91
Member
Hello everyone, just in time for Passover, I'm staring a cleaning and declutterring project by downgrading my 29 gallon hell hole to a shallow 20L. I love the look of 20Ls, and even though my tank looks awful, all the the livestock is extremely healthy. I have a couple of SPS that are growing rapidly and a derasa that's doing tremendously better than I expected and has put on about an inch in length the last 4 months.
I have so much more knowledge now than I did when I started my current system. I converted a high-salinity brackish to a full reef, and that was a terrible idea. I'm trading my dwarf fuzzy for a frag at my LFS, and going with a shallow sand bed since my HOB fuge has a DSB. Despite having a fuge, remora, and relatively low bioload (The fuzzy is the lone fish and he's only 2 inches), I still cannot beat the hair algae. I realize now that the reason I have so much HA is that I added sand gradually to a gravel bed, knowing nothing about substrates, and now the trates have no hope but to leach out in abundance, but are soaked up by the HA so it reads 0 ppm.
Anyway, after all of this rambling, my plan is to have a shallow sand bed with 10-15 pounds of fine sand in the display, and the 6" dsb in the fuge, unless someone of superior intelligence tells me I need more. I have about 35 pounds of rock, but I'm only going to transfer the large pieces and leave the rubble behind. In the downgrading process, I'm going to wait about 2 months before I start adding coral to see how things do. I think this downgrade is going to turn out to be a huge upgrade in the future.
Please give me some tips and criticism. I appreciate all of the knowledge and experience on the forums.
I have so much more knowledge now than I did when I started my current system. I converted a high-salinity brackish to a full reef, and that was a terrible idea. I'm trading my dwarf fuzzy for a frag at my LFS, and going with a shallow sand bed since my HOB fuge has a DSB. Despite having a fuge, remora, and relatively low bioload (The fuzzy is the lone fish and he's only 2 inches), I still cannot beat the hair algae. I realize now that the reason I have so much HA is that I added sand gradually to a gravel bed, knowing nothing about substrates, and now the trates have no hope but to leach out in abundance, but are soaked up by the HA so it reads 0 ppm.
Anyway, after all of this rambling, my plan is to have a shallow sand bed with 10-15 pounds of fine sand in the display, and the 6" dsb in the fuge, unless someone of superior intelligence tells me I need more. I have about 35 pounds of rock, but I'm only going to transfer the large pieces and leave the rubble behind. In the downgrading process, I'm going to wait about 2 months before I start adding coral to see how things do. I think this downgrade is going to turn out to be a huge upgrade in the future.
Please give me some tips and criticism. I appreciate all of the knowledge and experience on the forums.