Cleaning the marine tank sump. This is a live sump—live rock, sand, everything a tank has, except fish…
Or it’s supposed to be without fish. Three fish escaped via the drain upstairs, made it through complex piping, being very cigarette shaped and tiny—and I was able to get 2 of them out and upstairs again. One is doing pretty well. I’m afraid the smaller one may have dived through the plumbing again to rejoin the buddy in an area I couldn’t reach.
I washed sand (it comes filled with chalk dust) and siphoned muck, which you might optimistically call mud if you didn’t know it was fish poo half an inch thick in spots. The sandbed has been through heck and whatever, and hasn’t been handling it well, and I kept on postponing doing something, even if I know how bad the 54g tank got during breakdown — before we converted it to freshwater and connected the living sump to the new 105g. I should have done this long since, but I went in and hauled out (by hand, in cramped space) 3.5 gallons of very mucky sand, replacing it with new, and leaving enough muck behind to ‘seed’ the new sand with bacteria. In point of fact, because I have a functioning healthy sandbed in the 105 g it will ‘carry’ the system AND seed the new sand, but I couldn’t get the last of the muck out. I have been up and personal with bristle worms, sponges, and gotten stung (the worms) and gotten grit under my nails…I feel as if I need a bath in Clorox.
But…once we can see the fish again (the water is a little opaque with chalk dust) it will all be fine. That should make everything happier. Normally you leave these things alone, but this sump had an iffy start back in 2007 when we set up after the move and the sump I’d ordered didn’t come in and my microlife all cooked in the buckets waiting for it…I’d tried letting the system clean itself up naturally, but some times you just have to intervene and shovel…ahem…muck.
If you have roses, you chose the perfect season!
do you need to compost the muck or can you apply it directly to plants in the flower gardens?
Yes, but now you’re done and it’s over with and you don’t have to dread it any more. Do something nice for yourself now — bubble bath? Nice video?
I’m that way about the cat box. I have a Littermaid which I have modified so that it uses large drawstring garbage bags instead of those expensive little plastic containers. I only have to change it about every two weeks for three cats, and it only takes about 10 minutes to change the bag out, but sometimes I practically have to force myself at gunpoint to do it.
Cat related activities are always fun 😛 I tried to trim Zorro’s claws today, and it ended up like a Benny Hill routine, only with more scratching and without “Yakety Sax”. Fortunately, I had just bought more Neosporin.
Ehh, not sure the roses would appreciate the salt water in that muck, although they LOVE fresh-water muck
Nope, this stuff would not grow roses. 😉
And my thumb is now swollen and rather ouchy from bristleworm stings, the middle finger is the same, and I burned heck out of the little finger reaching for an escaping pot lid, so I am being rather protective of my left hand today…