Liverock exposed to copper

CHAMMER1

New member
Hello all! im new to this forum stuff and fairly new to the hobby. Anyhow i have a 90 reef and a 90 fish only. in the fish only i added copper to the tank to treat ick. it has about 40 lbs of liverock in it. i was told by petstore that the worms and critters in rock would die but the rock will still be beneficial to the tank?? so now i have 40lbs exposed to copper, can this ever be put in a reef again? and if i change my fish only tank to a 125 and put the live rock in it and dont want to treat it ever with copper, am i exposing the glass and tank to copper that was probably absorbed by the rock? also how about the substrate? I guess i should have researched this before i added copper to the tank.
Thank you for the help
 
Live rock and aragonite/crushed coral substrates absorb copper and can release it later on. Glass does not absorb copper and the tiny amt that the silicone may absorb is ime inconsequential. It really is a matter of scale. If you put the 40 lbs into a 30 gal reef there would be a much greater chance of problems than if you put it into a 125 gal reef. You can calculate how much copper you added and then figure out what level that would produce in any given volume of water. It is highly doubtful that it would ever all leach out, but better safe than sorry.
 
Some say a muriatic acid bath will cleanse copper, I'm no chemist and have not tried it myself. YOu can look into cuprasorb media
 
The muraitic acid bath will clean off the copper. But even after that I would suggest running some type of copper absorbing media in the system just to be safe.

Kim
 

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