HELP somethings wrong

[zep]

I must be doing something wrong and have a few questions.

1 Has anyone had any bad experences using playsand with about 1/2 inch of livesand covering it?

2 I put 120 lb of live rock that had come out of our other tank to was covered with coralin algae, feather dusters tiny serpent stars ,about 10 snales ,all look as if they are dead or dying. snales are all dead

3 due to a faulty hydrometer the salinity was @ 1.032 and totaly peged out, it took 38gl of fresh r/o water to get the water down to 1.023 in the 120gl the liverock came out of. Did I throw everything into shock bringing the salinity down that fast

4 Am I cooking everything wiht the new lights ? The temp stays @79.5 with lights on or off. 2- 275 watt metal 2 VHO.

 

[LittlePuff]

Sand sounds fine.

I'm guessing the salinity did it.

I don't think you use lights for the cooking process.
Your temp needs to be around 82.

Kim

 

[zep]

Thanks LittlePuff Ill bump the temp up a few and see if that helps. Is it nessary to increase the amount of time the lights are on over a few days or weeks?

 

[LittlePuff]

Keep the lights off. The whole idea of "cooking your rocks is to get the die- off and kill algae. Since you're not doing it in buckets, do you have some powerful powerheads to blow the gunk off? How often are you replacing the water?

Kim

 

[richtpe]

4 Am I cooking everything wiht the new lights ? The temp stays @79.5 with lights on or off. 2- 275 watt metal 2 VHO.

Are you asking if the temp is too high in the tank or are you actually looking to "cook" your live rock? I don't have any personal experience with it, but from what I understand "cooking" your rock is a way of cleansing your live rock before putting it into the aquarium (gets rid of all the detritus and I think most live organisms on the rock - again I don't have any personal experience so you may want to search this board or someone else can chime in).

If you're asking if the temp is ok, I think that sounds fine - especially if it's staying at a fairly constant temp. Organisms don't react well to big fluctuations in the temp. My water stays at around 80 degrees and things are fine.

Regarding your sand, I agree with LittlePuff and think it'll be fine. The live sand will seed the play sand and eventually make it "live" as well. If the two sands are a different size granual, the finer sand will eventually work it's way to the bottom.

From your post it sounds like you took all your live rock out of an established tank (where I'm assuming the salinity was ok) and put them into the larger tank with the very high salinity. I'd think the rapid change in salinity levels when you did that caused all of the die-off (I'm assuming that you didn't slowly acclimate everything to the new tank since you thought the salinity was ok). It probably didn't help matters to lower the level so quickly. I also had a faulty hydrometer at one time and my salinity was at 1.030. Nothing in the tank looked too bad so I gradually lowered the level (over a few weeks) down to 1.024 and everyone was still fine. So I'm thinking that it was the shock from rapid change that caused your problem.

You may want to consider investing in a refractometer and ditching the hydrometer.

 

[zep]

what I ment by cooking the liverock was going from pc to 2 x 275 watt metal halide + 2x110 watt vho . The liverock has been cured for some time I just put it in the other tank. The salinity in the tank the LR was in before was very high.
sorry about the confusion......

 

[reefrash]

Snails are sensitive to temp and salinity changes (which to me seems crazy if you've ever seen where they live). Temp is fine however you may want to raise your lights up if you feel you are "cooking" everything in your tank, and slowly drop them to thier final position. At this point the only thing I would worry about is an algae bloom due to an elevated level of nitrogen from recent events, and a lot of light.