bringing life back to liverock/ general plan for my setup

Seth W

New member
Well I'm starting to get things going on my new tank setup (75g acyrlic, 30g sump and 55g refuge) and I'm a little stumped on my live rock situation. I think I'm doing things right on how to reseed it but I just want to make sure that I'm doing things right. My last attempt was going down hill when I had a 55g setup so I tore everything down and let the live rock dry in a bucket for about 6 months. Now I finally have the funds to do things right and start my tank back up. I went ahead and boiled my rocks to make sure any odd crap was dead on them and figure that once I have water in all my tank systems to use this rock as a base and seed it with some uncured liverock to kick things off, is this the way to go about doing this?

As mentioned I got a 75g acrylic setup with a closed loop system to it 4 returns with a "squid" current thing on them and a 3500gph pump (or something like that...lots of flow to it). I figure from their run a overflow into my 30g makeshift sump/refuge. run my skimmer, uv stearilizer heaters and so on and plant a few mangroves in my upper section that I made for them. From their pump things into a 55g tank that will be for a refugeium setup then pump it all back into the main tank. this sound like a good idea. For lights I have a aquaspace light with 4 T-12's?...(small size bulbes 2 blues 2 whites) for the 55g along with 2 compact florecents for the mangroves at this point. For the main tank the plan is to run 2 or 3 of my T5 (bigger diamiter lights) and 2 250 halides.

I'm still in the precess of setting things up so any input or advise would be great. I've done this before 2x but kind of half assed things and made some bad decisions in the past, this time I'd like to do things right.
 
All it takes is some fresh LR to get things going. You want to make it like any curing tank when you first add the new rock. I'd skip the UV while you do this as you want coralline to move to the older rock and populate it. The UV may hinder that process. When ammonia and nitrite are zero then you can add livestock but be very sparing in this as that old rock will take time to develop and you will have a low capacity biofilter while it is re-activated.
 
cool, thanks for the instite. Yeah I was figureing to leave the uv and protien skimmer off during the cyceling process. I figure I'll give it a good 6-8 weeks and not rush things. I'll probibly go with a few reef chromis for starters once it's cycled.

BTW later on down the road do you guys have any good links for cleaner crews? I had a really good link for a place out of cali that delt with snals and crabs but I lost the link. I'm not a big fan of crabs (who is:)) so I figure mostily nasarris snails and turbos along with a lawn mower blenny for cleanup. any advise on a general cleanup crew?
 
Not everyone is against crabs... I think that they are Hilarious. i know they sometimes kill snails but snails are cheap and I like the entertainment.
 
First off why did you kill you original live rock? All you have now is very expensive base rock.

If you were having trouble with alge?
 
check out vividaquariums.com for some nice cleaner crews, or drfostersmith.com as well.

They have hermit crabs in theirs, but I for one enjoy the crabs. Fun to watch
 
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