Curing rock in a new tank

D

dasickle

New member
Hi,

I have a 70G tank setup with lights, skimmer, wave makers and etc. At the moment its just sitting empty in my dinning room because I am having trouble finding good rock.

Best I was able to find in a local store was Pukani Live Rock that has been curing in a rock vet for about two weeks. Looks like dry rock that was just put in water and costs $7.99 per pound.

Since the tank is new, could I just put some Pukani Air shipped rock into the empty tank and cure it?

Once cured, I will drain the water from the tank into a container along with the rock. Add sand in the tank, scape the rock and fill it with fresh water.

Does that sounds like a good plan?
 
Yes, that will be fine. I put dry rock in my new tank let it cycle and had a bit of GHA growing, but my GFO took care of that. Never had a problem with the rock. I never drain the tank or nothing. I put dry rock down, then sand, and filled with water and cycled the tank.
 
I would just rinse the rock really well. But like scooter don't drain the water (just do a decent water change). The new rock can help your cycle too once you add a source of ammonia.
 
Should I add sand or no. Some people told me that during curing send can suck up a ton on bad stuff that will hang there for a while.
 
Before adding it to the tank would strongly suggest to use a tub first and test for phosphates. Pukani is notorious for leaching phosphates and it can take months to cycle (been there, done that!). If you cycle in a tub and have high phosphates you can use lanthanum chloride (SeaKlear phosphate remover) to drop phosphates in just a couple of weeks. Doing this outside of the DT will enable you to rinse the rocks in salt water so as not to introduce any precipitate from the LC to the tank.
 
People love the tbs rock if you want a lot of life on it. It's really personal choice whether you get live or dry rock.

For dry rock Marco is good, so is reefcleaners.org. Both claim to treat the rock for phosphates before they ship it. I got some real nice dry rock from reef cleaners, $2 per pound free shipping. My rock didn't leach any phos. It was very easy to aquascape the dry rock since you can set it up, then come back after a day or two and change it around, without having to keep it wet.

TBS is very popular for live, I don't think brs has been doing the air rock long enough for there to be very many reviews on it. It's nice how they ship to your house instead of having to deal with the freight people at the airport, and live Pukani is awesome if it works out. The tbs rock is a concrete product that has sat in the ocean to allow critters to populate it. I'm a cautious person, I'd rather see a few more happy customers before I spent that kind of money on brs air rock.

Note also that when sellers talk about dry rock they don't always mean the same thing. There's is really clean dry rock mined from the ground that looks white, and also rock that used to be live but got dried out. If it used to be live, it may take a while for the dead stuff that's still on there (worms, bacteria etc) to rot away. That curing process is separate from removing phosphate that has bound to the rock itself. The first is a matter of growing bacteria to eat the ammonia, the second involves running the rock in phos-less water (using gfo or lanthanum chloride) until all the phos soaks out. You can also just burn off the outside of the rock with bleach and acid for a fresh start on both fronts.
 
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