Travis: What's up guys? Welcome back to FishOfHex, my name is Travis. In today's video, we're going to be doing a 50-gallon water change on the 300-gallon reef.
Now, if you missed yesterday's video, we went ahead and cleaned the mixing station, prepared the water for today, and it's up to 1.026, and we're ready to go ahead and do this water change. Now, it's been about a month and a half since I did my last, and you guys can see, there'a lot of detritus at the bottom of the tank.
Now, with all the flow, I get the majority of it up into the water column, and into the filter socks, but there are some dead spots where you can see there's plenty of detritus, and we're gonna go ahead and take care of all that here in this water change. So, with all that said, let's go ahead and get started.
Okay, so the first thing I want to do is clean the glass with the tigershark flow. Now, I did do a video on this glass cleaner and it works out very well. I'm definitely not ever going to use any other type on my main display tank, and that video will be in the 300-gallon playlist. Now, I use the Coraline attachment blade, and I just do a once over on the front inside panels, getting into all the nooks and crannies, taking care of as much of that stuff as I possibly can.
Now, there are some spots where it's difficult at the angle, but I'm not really too worried about that. When I do more in-depth type of water changes where I'm getting in there with razor blades and all sorts of stuff, that's what I focus on then, but for now just doing it once over, getting all the algae and Coraline off the glass is what this is used for.
Now, there is one more thing I like to do in preparation for the water change, and that is coming in here with a razor blade and clean the top of the glass where the Magnaflow just can't reach. It takes a couple minutes and it makes a big difference on how the tank looks.
Okay, so here's one last look of one and a half months of detritus buildup and you can see that most of it is forward and will be easy to access, not only with the suction hose, but to also get in there and scrape some of it out, and that's by design and the way that I have the power heads set up. So, with that said, let's go ahead and dive in and start getting this stuff out.
Alright, so when it comes to removing the detritus, I like to use a 3/4 inch hose that drains down into a 55-gallon drum, attach the wheels in which I can move out of the fish room, and then have it drain into the ditch in the backyard. Now, I don't throw this stuff down into the sink or anything like that, just easier to have it go out there, where it doesn't negatively impact the sewage or cause any issues.
So, now I like to go ahead and just siphon out all the detritus that I can reach with this hose, getting into all the corners and moving some of the corals around the plate coral. Just getting in there and getting all the detritus out. This stuff just builds up in specific spots, and like I said before, it's not really in the back, it's all forward, where I can take care of it quickly.
So it's a pretty easy process. I just go from rock structure to rock structure, moving corals around and getting all the detritus that I can see.
Now sometimes I come in here with a powerhead, depending on how much detritus there is. I didn't do it this time because of the sheer amount of it. I didn't want to blow it all around, but I would like to do was focus the powerhead flow kind of underneath the rock structure where it will pick up and move that detritus around and eventually have it go into the overflow.
