help with my bleached LR

[cmacld]

So i had decided months ago that i was going to bleach my rock for my new tank... with that in mind i did much research on the subject... I made a mixture of 1cup bleach to 5 gallons of water... my plan was to leave the rocks in over the period of a couple days... however, i was called out of town for work and asked my roomate to take care of getting the rocks out of the tank.... Two weeks later.. i arrived home to find my rocks still in the tank =(. So i took the rocks out and dried them in the sun for a week! After that i took the rock.. placed in a tank with fresh SW.. and a day later i still had an extreme amonia levels.... with a few water changes and parameters not changing much... i decieded to boil the rocks.... i took a day and boiled 300 lbs of my rock.. (not a fun process, nor do i suggest it) so at this point i should have any and all ammonia from my rocks.. right? but now that i have them in a cycling tank once again.. i am still getting readings of ammonia in the tank.... no where near as extreme but still there

Has anyone made this mistake before? and how did you cure it? I dont want to loose all of this rock.. they are all prize pieces that i have been collecting for over 5 years..

I hope that this was posted in the right forum..
Any input would be great.. thanks in advance

 

[Jay180reef]

I've never done that before but I'd just let them be for a few weeks. I'd say you killed off almost everything and the ammonia is from the dead material. Post some pics of them for more responses.

 

[savichus]

I got bunch of LR from the very neglected tank with the tank itself. Previous owner bought all this LR (probably 250 lb), making himself a present for Christmas. Then he was fighting with hair algae for years until I got this tank from him. So I did the same thing that you did- I put all of this rock into two trash cans but with bit more concentrated bleach mixture. Usually to clean my filter socks I keep them for a couple of days in the mix of bleach and water in the proportion 10 parts of water and one part of bleach. All of the organics gets dissolved in this mix and after that I rinse them in water with dechlorinator that I bought at the petco store. The same thing I used to cook my LR. I know that bleach is taking care of all the organics and after a few days when I removed the rock from my cooking system I was very satisfied but i figured out that some of the organic still present here and there so I'm planning to repeat this procedure once again. And when I was setting up my first 180 gal. tank I bought about 150lb. of the LR from one guy but wasn't quite sure that I should use it as is, so I boiled it just like you did. I got everything boiled but still on the rock and in the rock! This time I'm very confident about using the bleach, the only one reason that it didn't work from the very first time is that the LR was just covered in all sorts of life cause the tank was established for 10+ yrs. I feel sorry for getting rid of everything that was growing for the number of years on that rock, but I'm looking forward to have hassle free tank in the future. Proportions that I'm using in my mix is about 5-6 parts of water to 1 part of bleach. I'm buying bleach at the Costco wholesale and it's dirt cheap there. After I'll be done with my aqua scape in the new tank I'll fill it with water mixed with cheap salt that contains chlorine removing agent in it. And for you I'd recommend to soak your rock again in the strong bleach solution again and have all the organics removed rather than just killed. Because it can leach phosphates for a very long time. Good luck!