Acquired a 20g tall saltwater setup

[bdottington]

So, a friend of mine wanted to get rid of his 20g tall saltwater setup. I picked it up today, with about 20lbs of live rock, 20lbs of live sand, 2 damsels (one is definitely a yellow tail, and I'm not sure on the other, I'll get a picture of it once it decides to come out from hiding) a couple of crabs and at least one unknown species of snail. The transport went well, as I prepared fairly thoroughly after reading a lot on this and other forums. It comes down to this, the tank wasn't properly cared for over the last few months, the salinity was off the chart (I added some ro/di water to bring it down quite a bit), it's loaded with aiptasia, and the nitrates are off the chart. While the nitrates are extremely high, ammonia is at 0 and nitrites are also at 0. The only other thing that I noticed was carbonate hardness was low for what i expected to see, it was sitting around 60ppm. As for filtration, it has a API superclean 50 HOB, and 2 hydor koralia 240gph powerheads. This is my first forray into saltwater, but I have a good amount of experience with freshwater and know enough about water parameters that I have a bit of a water quality problem right from the start.

Any suggestions and/or general advice would be greatly appreciated.

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[fish wrangler]

First of all welcome to the forum and welcome to the salty side!

To lower the nitrates I would do a 50%wc every day for a week, you want nitrates to be under 10ppm for a fish only system. Once you get them to 10ppm a 50% weekly wc should be enough to keep them down.
Once that is under control you might want to look at some peppermint shrimp to take care of the aipista, be aware that not all peppermints will eat the aipista though. If you don't want to use shrimp you can buy products like aipista X to kill them.

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