I'm 'cooking' - so now what?

[droth335]

Having had a nasty infestation of hair algae (tank neglect during divorce...) I decided to 'cook' the rock in my 180. I sold my livestock so I could do all the rock at once. Now my question is: how do I ensure the HA is gone after the cooking process is complete? Would it be safest to completely drain and scrub the tank & sump and start over? Any thoughts or experiences would be appreciated. Thanks,

 

[sikpupy]

MHO - Lots of bleach, and, or, muriatric acid. Cooking for algea alone is a waste. Since you went through all the trouble to sell the live stock, drain all water from display, pull out any sand, clean the tank with bleach (not that it may be needed but this would take care of anything in it), soak the rock in a nice heavy helping of bleach for 4 days, wash sand real good with bleach, rinse, rinse and rinse everything again, then go ahead and cook the rock. If you wanted to, you could rinse the sand real good, let it dry, throw it back into the tank. You could then fill the tank and let it go through a cycle with the sand right away. The rock will have Po4 locked in that would need to be cooked out, or, you can throw it in the tank too and go through a big cycle and be done with it, but, you would have to keep the tank dark until the Po4 level came down. This way, leaving the tank dark, nothing starts to grow from the extra Po4 in the rock.

Glad you kept the tank