3 days of night

After reclaiming the chemistry of my tank along with scrubbing 47lbs of LR and a skimmer/filter upgrade, I want to take an extra precaution and black out the tank for 3 days to kill whatever I missed(havent seen anything yet). I have a neon dotty back, 2 clowns, a starfish and a black urchin. Does anyone have any opinions on this method? ;D

 

i covered my tank for 5 days with 2 black trash bags so the light couldn't shine through
and i have corals and fish

 

How was the end result?

 

I have turned off all lights for 5 days and I have SPS, clams, LPS, plus many fish when I had dino outbreak.

Everybody was fine...the fish stayed in the rocks more when the lights did were out....but everybody fared really well. Did not loose a single thing.

Make sure you gradually reintroduce the light. I started out with my acentics only for 3 hours the first day, then next day turned on my MH for a couple hours with the acentics and gradually increased the amt for a week until I got it back to full cycle.

But I have a 12" clam, along with 6 other smaller clams, a ton of SPS and all were fine.

Good luck

 

question....you scrubbed the rock? Did you cycle the rock again before you put it back in your tank. I am not sure, but I would think you are going to face a big cycle? Maybe someone else can post on that. But when I pulled my rock out of my one tank, I ran it in FW for 2 days. When I put the rocks back in there was a major cycle. I even ran the rocks in a container with SW and skimmer for 5 days after the FW before I put it back in tank

 

I was doing a water change so I used the water I took out to rinse the rock off after scrubbing it down before returning it back to the tank.

 

I think you might have induced a major die off by putting the LR into FW. That would effectively kill everything live on it. I don't think the soak in SW would have much of an effect other than sloughing off some of the death induced upon the rock.

If LR is removed from a tank and scrubbed in SW, such as the water the OP removed from his tank for a water change; there should be no risk of inducing a cycle, as there's nothing really to die--I would think.

 

yeah....when I did the FW soak I was trying to kill off everything. I had major problems with that tank....I called it the tank from Hell!

I took the tank down and basically restarted it. I used the saltwater soak to rinse the die off off before putting it back in. I then reseeded the tank with some new LR

But I was thinking that even with the SW scrub there was going to be some die off also but again not sure

 

So do you think 3 days should be enough or should I wait a full 5 before unavailing the tank?

 

Wow... 5 days and nothing died? I guess I'm not so scared to attempt a blackout to stunt some GHA.