Ooo ooo that smell..... cycling question

[Darby]

So everything is going swimmingly on cycling my 150. I finally found the drain-to-return ballance, which was dang tricky. The skimmer is doing it's thing, barely, though it appears that later before I add livestock I may need to add a powerhead to up the flow.

Anyways...

I'm using mostly uncured liverock. I just don't have the space to cook it. My whole house has this earthy smell to it, not like bad decay, but more like wet leaves and dirt. I'm sure that it'll dissipate after a month or two. Hopefully I can hold out that long... :roll:

So, the question is: on a tank this large, do you change out water during the cycle?

 

[DaveJ]

@Darby wrote:

The smell will get worse Yes, do water changes every couple of weeks. Not only will it reduce the smell, but it will help minimize the funk in the bottom of the tank. As you do the change, take a powerhead and blow the rocks off or even scrub them with a toilet brush or something similar to get the dead and decaying matter off them. You can do this in the tub/can of water you drain off into. You could do it in the tank itself, but the idea is to get as much crud out of the tank as possible.

I am curious about the return/drain balance you were mentioned.. in a 150 you should dual overflows. That will handle quite a bit of return flow from the sump, what kind of pump are you using for the return and how are your overflows setup? You shouldn't have worry about adjusting anything in that regard... unless you are using an overflow box or something like that.

 

[BigJay]

Best advice I got from Frank: cure the rock with lights out in the tank.

I did maybe one water change during the ordeal, and that only after the ammonia and nitrItes went away.

The only "rock cleaning" I did was blasting it with a powerhead to remove the dead matter. I also started up my two vortechs, main return/drain, and skimmer to keep the detritus circulating until it was skimmed out.

I kept the tank bare-bottom until the cycle was completed, so that I could siphon out any garbage that settled in the bottom. I re-aquascaped maybe three or four times during this time. Between that and the powerhead cleaning, there was quite a bit to remove.

The earthy ocean smell went away after two weeks if I remember right. My baby son is still in diapers, so I still have that "change me!" smell in my house every few hours like clockwork. TBH I really didn't notice the tank.

Good luck!

 

[Darby]

I bought that tank form another member, and though it ahd bee a reef tank at one time, it was more recently a Poison Dart Frog habitat! As such, there was no overflow set up. But, it does have 3 bulkheads in the back face. Of the top two, one goes to a closed loop (QuietOne 4400), the other drains to the sump. I put a movebale overflow over the drain, kind of triangular shaped (made out of a corner overflow, it actually helps flow get around it rather than being an square shaped obstruction). The sump also came with it, and was also a frog habitat. It's about 30-40 gal, and I had set it up to have a DSB, though since I went with one in the main tank there is a LOT of water in there now. Might put the tank on the closed loop for a while and cut down the bubble trap heights... The return is a Mag9.5 running up to a SCWD with the heads in each corner.

So, the balance was a matter of keeping enough water in the tank so as not to suck down a bunch of air while keeping the sump from getting too low or too full. Just had to find the point at which the drain and return were equal enough that also allowed surface skimming.


I'm actually hoping that some of the algea on the rock will come back to life. Some even has a great deal of purple coraline on it, and it'd be a shame to lose all of that. Over the last week, very little detritus has been coming off of the rock, despite occasional blasting. I've been running the lights for about 3 hours, between 6 and 9pm, mainly so I can keep tabs on everything more easily when I get home.

 

[orchidsnfish]

What kind of skimmer are you using. I had some rock cycling and my whole house smelled rotten. I put my NW200 in there and within hrs the smell was gone and the cup was full of nasty gunk. It worries me that the skimmer isn't pulling anything (or much) out. Now with uncured rock it's going to stink some, but still. The main thing is you saying the skimmer is "barely" doing it's job. It should have a ton of stuff to pull out.

I have always run carbon when curing rock, but I'm not sure it it's ok to do. Has always worked for me. It does help with the smell.

Angela

 

[Darby]

The skimmer is a Coralife 250g needle wheel. It worked great for about 4 hours at full tank startup, then stopped making microbubbles after I monkied with it. That was saturday night, and it took until lastnight to realise that I had it too deep, about 6" rather than 4". That was party due to the adjustment of the overflow/return balance thing. I should have qualified "barely working" as "just started working this morning".

And the skimmer is the thing that stinks most!