Alright so here is the story... no this is not my tank. I was asked to come in and "help" it. So the first picture is what it was when I walked in and the picture below was during the middle of cleaning it up.
I want to share this so that if any of you get to this point that you dont just throw in the towel. Yes being proactive is the choice here as was mentioned but if travel, works or illnesses keep it so you cant keep up on it what do you do when it gets to this point?
I will get another picture and show you know because it looks amazing!
Here is what I did:
I pulled out as much as I could by hand (this is a big tank so I cant even reach the bottom and I have long arms).
Then I took a tooth brush and scrubbed the rocks. It was kinda like digging for dino bones because there were some corals that were in here.
Next there was a lot of floating loose stuff so I took a net and spent about and hour "fishing" it out to help clean it up.
Then I cleaned the filter socks.
Got the skimmer cleaned out and running a little wetter.
Then I noticed that one power head was working but barely. I took the others out. Put 2 new ones in and cleaned out the one that was clogged up.
It went from maybe 500 gph water movement to over 8000 gallons from the powerheads alone.
Then I added a TON of snails, crabs, a sea hare, a fox face. (And they have all gone to town)
Added Carbon and GFO
LASTLY the fish were doing great in this tank.... the corals were dying slowly... why? Because the salinity was 1.017 ..... so this fish were doing awesome. I slowly raised that over a week and the corals are starting to do much better.
I went up last this Tuesday and almost all the hair algae is gone. There is some spots were it is at, but those spots I noticed are covered by snails and crabs.
So all in all it took about 5 hours of work and a little money but it looks like a whole new tank.
Ill get some more pictures here shortly so you can see what it looks like now.