got our rocks from marcorocks.com

[Sparkss]

Check out some pictures in our tank build thread... as one of the posters pointed out, these aren't rocks, their more like boulders (and my back bloody well is feeling it after hefting them up a ladder into the tank ).

http://www.reefcentral.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&postid=9023809#post9023809

I highly recommend this rock vendor.. very high quality, true, base rock (not solid chunks of rock quarried from some inland florida mine).

Cheers

 

[TimTen]

very nice. I really like your build thread

 

[Sparkss]

Thanks... it has been a long process... and it's not like we are really near the end or anything , but at least we can see visible progress being made, and that it always a good thing

We just hope that by sharing our build "experience" (more like "roller coaster ride") that someone else might be able to benefit from what we had to go through to make it happen

 

[TOURKID]

i got my marcorocks in my tank ten days ago... and good god do i have a diatom issue

I also love the rocks they are huge and light, but let me know how your tank looks in a few days. mine looks terrible today.

heres a pic from yesterday. it has at least quadrupled in brownness

 

[Sparkss]

oh, yea, I wholly expect a pretty big cycle, but we do have 50# or so of mature LR from our current tank to seed it with (another 150 - 200# if I really want to) and we also already seeding it with about a half gallon of live sand from our tank and fuge and I plan to throw some more in tomorrow. We also filled the tank solely with RO/DI water, and it has been running, salinated for almost 3 weeks now (give or take.. I don't remember the exact date), with the LR, 75# of base rock (dead LR that was sun drying out back) and the livesand. Hopefully it all had time to do it's own mini little cycle (between the LR and base rock) and get some of the bacteria established. But I still expect to go through seom hellish cycles before everything settles out. After the initial "wave" I may turn open the valves and complete the connection to our established 100g fuge/sump to get some more matured water flowing through it. All of these steps I am hoping will help minimize the pain of getting this new tank up and running.

I already see a ton of pods running around, and a bunch of snails and brittle stars from the LR and LS. I wonder how many of them will make it through the cycle that is coming ? I guess worse case I will need to throw another clump of chaeto from the sump into the tank after the main cycle completes, to reseed the pods, stars, worms, snails and what not.

 

[sfsuphysics]

Damn Tom those are some big fricking rocks, I have a few large pieces,basketball sized that I could barely fit in my 18" wide tank (due to the bracing) but nothing to that scale.

 

[orientalexpress]

wow,that awsome.just what i needed.

 

[Elite]

Yeah those are huge .. Very nice Tom..

 

[Kinetic]

I got 25 lbs of marco (dry) rocks recently too to add to my 45lbs from reeferrocks.

Reeferrock (dry rock) seem to be more "glassy" and sharp, and they're very white compared to marco. Looks almost like they're bleached. But super porous.

Marco gave me much bigger pieces, and the shapes were awesome! Very little breakage. I'd highly recommend them as well.

 

[Sparkss]

I agree Art, I have some old pieces from an order we did from reeferrocks and the shapes from MarcoRocks just blows them away IMO (yea, not to mention the sizes are immense).

Just to clarify, I specifically requested the larger pieces, and paid a premium price for them, specifically for the larger footprint of our new tank (and having it eurobraced, so no center brace to deal with). Although in the grand scheme of things the "premium" price didn't really add that much to our bill for the rocks. It maybe increased it 20% - 25% overall (when shipping and the smaller rocks are all factored in).

One thing that Marc did for us was picked up from fiberglass rods fmro HD there in his area, for very cheap, and threw them into the order and shipping box. This time of year they have tall driveway markers for outlinging your driveway edges in the snow drifts (They looked to be 24"+ tall). They are basically 3/8" fiberglass rods with a reflector on top and run about $1 each. Of course they are not available here in the Bay Area, but he was making an HD run anyways and picked up a dozen for us so that we could use them for connecting the rocks together, if needed. That way I didn't need to buy the expensive rod from those online vendors.

Marc also added a box of rubble, for a rubble zone in our new fuge that we are setting up. All in all he really went above and beyond with us and our order, and I know that ours is far from the largest tank or largest order that he has serviced, but he still made us feel "special". That is often lacking in dealings with many of the online vendors.