Swapping Rubble Bed For Sand

[Bluntokian]

Wassup everyone. Im a constant lurker on NR and I dont post a lot or have tank threads on here because I do all that on Temperate Reef. I have a 10 gallon nano with a "Florida Rubble Rock" bed about 2 inches deep. I wanted to go with sand however at the time I went with what I could get a hold of. Now I have a fairly bad algae problem and from what iv observed and tested its because of the excess food getting into the bed and decaying where my CUC cant get to it. Tank is about 2 months old and ive already had to do a nasty gravel vaccuum once to get things decently under control. Stock is: 1 YCG, 1 Red Tipped Hermit, 1 Zebra Hermit, 2 Scarlet hermits, 2 Black Turbos, 1 Zebra Turbo, Basball sized piece of gracilliaria (Cant spell I know), A little Titan Flame algae and an approx 2"x2"x6" super dense clump of chaeto in a media basket. Due to availability of live rock and the fact that my LFS wants $15/pound for anything half decent it was seeded with a small bottle of bio-spira and .2 Lbs of live rock. all I have available as far as testing equipment currently is the basics. Ammonia:0 Nitrite:0 Nitrate:~0 PH: ~8.0 Now the little ~ is there because we all know how thecolors on the results card are.

 

Anyway back on topic and sorry to repeat anything already said I got distracted. Im wondering if it would be reasonable to remove all the livestock from the tank and remove the water and rubble. Vacuum the bottom replace with sand and replace vaccumed water with newly mixed. I have well water for WC's and as far as my tests and examinations of the well equipment and house plumbing theres no reason to suspect anything else. Unless of course theres an incredibly minor amount of silicates being leached in. However last WC was aprrox 6 weeks ago to allow the tank to cycle out the nitrates phosphate etc that may be causing the bloom. After all this time the only thing that I can say I would expect to be causing it would be the excess food being caught in the rubble.

 

Skimping on food is something im good at however because of the purchase size of the YCG (As in barely IDable it was so small) I mixed a pack of mysis and brine shrimp so that it would have a varied diet starting out as well as be able to adapt to mysis if it was too small to manage it. Needless it say he can still barely handle 1/4 of a hole mysis shrimp so theyre cut up in the food. Anyway I had to refreeze them in an ice tray because my cat tried to eat the containers why I was letting the food defrost some before mixing. Getting to the point here lol sorry...umm...I cant cut a small enough amount off of the cubes to just feed him. He usually eats about a half a mysis and is full so the rest of the food just whirls around and about 30 minutes later finally ends up in the rubble bed. Of course the hermits love the food they can get too however its a fairly large grain size and most of the food ends up too deep for anything to get to it.

 

Needless to say there isnt yet a lot of life in the bed if any and I hope to be able to seed it with live sand and pods from my LFS soon when I start and seed my other tank. I know this could be and probably would be disasterous however its the only viable option I can think of short of spending money I wont have for at least another month. Algae wouldnt be such a problem however my emerald crab (after cleainng about 1/12th of the tank a night for 2 weeks) died for no apparent reason. Even then everything I could test came back fine and the only other casualty iv had was a small zebra hermit which I believe is attributed to him attacking my red tip for his shell a few times. Anyway sorry to write a book I kept forgetting what I was trying to say and still trying to give info. If for some odd reason pics are needed I just got a new FTS tonight. Everythings colors are brilliant and everything is eating and active or I wouldnt even think this might be the problem.

[Euphyllia]

That would completely re-cycle the who tank. You would need someone to keep your livestock for you if you did that.

[Bluntokian]

That would completely re-cycle the who tank. You would need someone to keep your livestock for you if you did that.

 

 

Okay. What about taking say 1/3-1/2 of the rubble out and replacing with sand so as to sort of mix them while also helping with my detritus problem? Aside from that any other ideas?

[Euphyllia]

Okay. What about taking say 1/3-1/2 of the rubble out and replacing with sand so as to sort of mix them while also helping with my detritus problem? Aside from that any other ideas?

 

Personally, I would manually remove all of the sand and add new live sand.

Prevents the huge re-cycle.

[Bluntokian]

Thats what I planned on doing. Basically take out everything and put it in a bucket then dump the bed add sand and refill etc.

[Bluntokian]

Well after doing a little thinking I decided to go for it and im glad I did. If nothing else just because of how easily the semi black muck in the bottom 3" of the tank was when I started sucking the water out from the rubble. It was so readily disturbed that I dont think il ever use rubble as my primary substrate again without serious reason. I figure we'll find out how much worse or how much better off I am in the short term (<1 week) and the long term (6 months+) and il try to keep this thread updated for everyones reference. However I would like everyone to keep in mind my tank is young and imo very lightly stocked and only fed once a week - every 2 weeks. Even that is only a few chopped up frozen mysis (the little guys in the cubes at petsmart) and about half a drop worth of brine shrimp.

[Bluntokian]

Well so far I have to say I made the right decision. All the algae left in the tank is browning and starting to die off. Lets hope it stays that way >.>