[justthewife]

Originally Posted by Sk8r

I dread to say that the crushed coral will pose a problem down the road: it IS a dirt-holder, and often concretes together and forms a mess. If you've an inch or so of crushed coral, you may need to clean it: the hobby generally quit using that substrate somewhere between 1980 and 2004, and went over to aragonite sand, which makes a nice, manageable sandbed. CC is far better than silicate! but has the two problems named. Back in the 1980's, I had one, and also had a Vortec diatom filter, a kludgy sort of device that you'd gasket with Vaseline and load with diatomaceous white earth and HOPE you got it set to suck rather than blow!---which would within a very few minutes have a completely clouded tank crystal clear. I'd stir it up, have the Vortec ready, and suck the nastiness completely out. In modern terms, I'd suggest if you have a shallow crushed coral bed and choose to do that, you might follow up the vacuuming with a filter sock in the system, to try to get the badness out as fast as possible. [I haven't seen a diatom filter in ages! (and one reason we don't still use them is that it also sucks all the microlife and pods and such out and kills them: modern tanks hope for lots of microlife] ---

What you've got can be worked with. Likely after a year or so, you'll be looking at qt'ing your fishes and corals and either getting the usual 'bigger tank' in a complete new system, or just doing a re-set up involving all the things you've learned. (A setup with the same rock and such often cycles very quickly, often within a week.)

If you choose to remove the CC and install aragonite, do it very slowly if dry sand (washed extremely thoroughly), or if you can pull it all, I'd go with 'live' aragonite and still pull the fish to qt until the system has had its short snit.

For right now, just don't worry much. Most people do a major revision one or two years into the hobby, and that's plenty of time to do something different.

Oh wow, you just probably cleared up some (still minor) problems I am having recently in the tank as the tank gets older.