Hello everybody

[LironB]

Just wanted to say hello to everybody. I've been reading the posts for a while and signed up today. Seems like a good group of people.

A little about me:

I'm a student at UT. My first venture into saltwater started last year. It was a 30 gallon and I was succesful in keeping several LPS and a happy community of fish without any problems. But then my tank started to leak, had to move everything to a new 40 Breeder and basically ever since then I've been battling all sorts of problems. Almost all my fish died following the move (if I had to do it again, I'd take them all to a LFS and have them hold my fishies for a while), hair algae, aptasia, cyano, and basically anything else you can think of choked out all my corals. Finally got rid of the aptasia and cyano, and just recently started a full on war against the hair algae after previous things didn't work. By full out war, I basically gave up, took out half the sand in my sandbed, scrubbed down my rocks, and did a 50% water change.

Anyways, thats me, and hopefully I'll meet some of y'all at some point or another through MAAST.

[Instar]

Welcome to MAAST LironB!!!

You should say thankyou to that mess you described cause without having that experience, you can't call yourself a reefer!
At least you didn't try to sell the aiptasias. Maybe that college is paying off?
J/K, good to have you as a member. You can meet us at the monthly meetings.

[matt]

Welcome to MAAST! I'm sure you'll get lots of free advice and moral support about whatever's going on in your system. I had a 45 breeder, and I think it's a great reef shape/size. Let me ask a question, when you took out your sand bed, did it have a sulfur smell? Probably the move cooked alot of your sand bed critters, leaving you with a big bio-load in the new set up and fewer animals in the sand to help process it. If you have 4" of fine grain sand like southdown, I'd get some live sand from Tim Marvin in Cedar Park. That will help to rebuild the sand bed population in your tank. After some time repopulating and stabilizing the sand bed, you could get a small yellow tang to knock out that hair algae. Good luck!

[dan]

hey lironb: welcome! welcome! to maast. :-D after the full out war did that help? i know it did something. hopefully for the best.

[OrionN]

Welcome. I hpoe we can be of help.
Minh

[GaryP]

LironB,

First, welcome to MAAST. I wish you had found us earlier before going through everything that you did with you tank. I'm sure several of the members could have been of help.

I'm going through a similar, but less severe, problems with my tanks after moving them a couple of months ago. A lot of the nutrients and detritus in the sand and LR is released when you moved it resulting in the blooms you are now experiencing. I keep a pretty large number clean up crew critters in my tank so that hair and cyano wasn't really a problem. My problems were bubble algae and flatworms. Like Larry said, if you don't have these kind of problems you can't call yourself a reefkeeper.

Gary

[TAXMAN]

welcome LironB. You will enjoy it here. Lots of nice people and lots of great advice.

[Sherri]

Welcome to MAAST LironB! Anytime you have questions or need help....there are some great people here that will do what they can to help you out.

[LironB]

Thanks for the welcomes everybody.

So far so good with the "new" tank. It's been a week and no problems yet. Did another water change yesterday and I'm hoping everything will keep steady.

[GaryP]

LironB,

IMHO the difference between a reefer and an ex-reefer is the ability to work through these kinds of problems. They will always come up and are part of the life cycle of any tank. Congrats on your success.

Gary