My 55Gal rock question

[sharat]

Any think this is too much rock. 65lbs in a 55g tank. seems too clusterd and to many spots for fish to get into and never come out.

Any thoughs would be great

 

[FishAddict87]

Any pictures? it is hard to tell without one. I have a 55 gallon with about 75 pounds of rock but everything seems happy. Fish need their own territories and caves in your tank so your aquascape might be fine. but then again this cannot be justified until there is a picture provided.

 

[sharat]

Sorry shows me there is a pic there maybe it dosent work i copyed the link from a diff site.... I created a album on here and added the pic. Hopefully this link works.

 

[FishAddict87]

Is all of your rock leaning on the back of the tank? one thing that I have found difficult was aquascaping my tank because it is very narrow. I actually searched other threads here for aquascaping ideas and found a few that I likes a lot. If you are concerned with not being able to see your fish very often then maybe you would want to try to make a rock wall on one side of the tank with rocks trickling down toward the other side of the tank. make sure you have plenty of caves for your fish though. Try to keep an open space for swimming as well. It seems like you have a lot of small pieces of rock which might make it difficult.

 

[sharat]

Yeah there are alot of smaller pieces then bigger. there are some ble/green chormis in the tank that stay hiding in the back left and only 1 comes out to eat. starting to wonder about the other 2. i can see them moving, so there not dead. Water is suppose to be dead on. Had several places double check my readings. I did however change the lights this evening and moved a few rocks to open up the left side a little. and Got the Marineland Led Single bright light system x2 ( 2 24" ones since they didnt have a 48 and wanted 3times the money for it.

 

[FishAddict87]

Im fairly new too..about a year and a half with my tank so my advice might not be exactly accurate but from what I have read, chromis will pick eachother off until there is just one. how long has your tank been up and running? and in that picture what is causing those bubbles toward the middle right? that might be scaring the fish possibly. It might even be bad for your tank (not totally sure about that but maybe someone more experienced will chime in soon). maybe if you take some pieces out and make a bigger open space in your tank for the fish to swim they might come out.

 

[sharat]

Tank was built with 60lbs of live sand and 65lbs of live rock from a tank that has been up and running for 5 years. After almost 2 weeks of constant good zero amm and zero nitrite and 5ppm nitrate. ph is a good 8.2 temp at 78deg
As far as them picking each other off i havent read that or seen anyone else say that before. i have read they tend to do better in groups of 5 or so. So i was waiting for a week 10 days to get a few more to add but if they are going to do that them im not going to..

 

[sharat]

Oh and the bubbles are a air pump.. Good or bad idea ?????

 

[sharat]

http://i1216.photobucket.com/albums/dd374/Ingram8110/tank.jpg

incase you want a bigger picture

 

[WetShepherd]

Oh and the bubbles are a air pump.. Good or bad idea ?????

Not needed when you have a skimmer - and you should have a skimmer for a 55g.

Your rocks are all quite small which is making them look a bit like a wall rather than a 'scape. Also note that you want to arrange them in such a way that they are touching each other or anything else as little as possible to maximize your surface area for cleaning bacteria - all while keeping it stable

One option, if you have a sump, is to place some of your rocks in there. They can still do their job from there. You might also consider removing your decorations as there just isn't much room for them in a 55. Maybe purchase some epoxy/puddy and bond some of those rocks together to form some interesting structures or shapes. It almost looks like you bought rubble-size instead of rock size.

My 'scape is essentially the same as yours but with more spaces between rocks and with a bit more space out front, while still leaving room for the shy guys to hide in the back when they need to.

Don't forget to leave room for coral if you plan on adding it. Some species require a chunk of your sand bed, where others can spread so fast that you need to keep them on an 'island' away from the rest of your rock to prevent them from taking over the tank. GL and have fun

60lbs in my 55g

 

[FishAddict87]

I couldnt make up my mind and still cant with aquascaping but these are two ways i arranged my rocks before (currently a totally different aquascape). hope you dont mind me posting these pics up...
My very first aquascape while I was starting to buy more and more live rock...
<a href="http://s1181.photobucket.com/albums/x431/rajppatel87/?action=view&current=IMG00656-20110610-0025.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://i1181.photobucket.com/albums/x431/rajppatel87/IMG00656-20110610-0025.jpg" border="0" alt="Photobucket"></a>

This is my second time scaping and was very satisfied with this but had to change it while trying to take some fish out which did not belong in my size tank =(

<a href="http://s1181.photobucket.com/albums/x431/rajppatel87/?action=view&current=IMG00720-20110619-0137.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://i1181.photobucket.com/albums/x431/rajppatel87/IMG00720-20110619-0137.jpg" border="0" alt="Photobucket"></a>

 

[sharat]

see wetshepard.. thats the kinda look im after.. But with th is rock im thinking its going to be to hard to achieve. I got all the rock and all the sand plus 2 times more then i needed all for 80 bucks from someone moving out of the area. I have 2 HoB filters. This has been a budget build from the start. I have a wet/dry but pump went out. Have a Angstrom UV steri unit that wont work with tank since its not drilled or anything. And no protien skimmer as of yet. Everybody locally so far has said dont worry about one right now.

 

[WetShepherd]

80 bucks - what a steal! 80 dollars plus just a little manual labor and I bet you can come up with something you are very happy with. I paid 500.00 for just my rock - and it was one of the items I wrote off as 'how much can rock cost' when I first decided to start my tank hahha. Great suprise.

Check out what CRC88 has going on in his build over here for ideas. He has a big rock pile to start but scaled it back to something pretty simple. I think the whole two island thing is a pretty cool option for our type of tanks.

You can wait on a skimmer; people were keeping SW tanks long before they were invented, but they make a pretty big difference. Just imagine what dumping one of those cups of brown sludge into your tank would do to your parameters and your cleaning haha. When the time comes, check out tunze in my sig if you want something small and simple.

 

[Daniel G]

Here is my 55g. Nice tank WetShepherd. My favorite fish in the left tank ha :beer:ha.
I don't know exactly how much rock I have but I think its like 45+ lbs.

 

[WetShepherd]

Thanks DG, right back at you. Wow that's some really nice rock in there - esp. like that one second from the left. You have so much life going on in there, I wish I had a hi-res image to get a good look. What is that little purple guy in the sand to the left of the left-most rock pillar? The big light colored one just left of center on the sand (hammer?) looks pretty cool too - is that a rock or skeleton under it? It looks almost vase shapped. How old is the tank?

Y'know shar, I was thinking more about your rocks - and with those msaller pieces you could really make any shape you want with a bit of epoxy putty. Small bits so you can easily break them apart later if you need too. You also have the huge advantage of more surface area which means a better biofilter

 

[Daniel G]

Thanks DG, right back at you. Wow that's some really nice rock in there - esp. like that one second from the left. You have so much life going on in there, I wish I had a hi-res image to get a good look. What is that little purple guy in the sand to the left of the left-most rock pillar? The big light colored one just left of center on the sand (hammer?) looks pretty cool too - is that a rock or skeleton under it? It looks almost vase shapped. How old is the tank?

Sorry, its an iphone pic that I had to resize. Yes, I like that piece too, its actually only one piece all the way up and I got it at a decent price too. Its 8 to 9 lbs alone. "The little purple guy" is actually a pom pom xenia and also the ones farthest to the left. I'm trying to get them growing on my overflow since there is not much flow there and think it would look nice. "The big light colored one" is a hammer (you're good since the resolution is so low, I don't think I coulda guessed that one.) Right under it is another head that was fairly small when I got it and has grown to be pretty big. I originally started with a 10g and upgraded to a 55g like in the middle of last year. I just recently got this new 55g since I really wanted one that was drilled with a built in overflow. I set it up around two months ago and basically re-did the rock work to something that I really liked and had had in mind for a while. And thank you.

 

[sharat]

Yeah the smaller peices would be a little easier to work with... I have some putty i tried using the other night that honestly some camel ejaculate would bond better i think... Was reading some people use superglue gel. so i m ight try that.. just got off the phone with local sw store and they said take the rocks out and leave them out over night to dry real good and try that.

Im thinking of taking the 2 larger chunks i have that werent live rock out of the tank and leaving them out.. and seeing what i can do with just straight lr. I will try the taking a few peices out tonight when i get home and see what happens.

 

[mbg75]

I would try to keep as much off the glass as possible for flow reasons. If you can't get flow to the backside, you have problems down the road with detrus buildup.
Of course if will touch the back in some spots, but try to minimalize as much as you can..

Sent from my ADR6300 using Tapatalk

 

[WetShepherd]

Yeah the smaller peices would be a little easier to work with... I have some putty i tried using the other night that honestly some camel ejaculate would bond better i think... Was reading some people use superglue gel. so i m ight try that.. just got off the phone with local sw store and they said take the rocks out and leave them out over night to dry real good and try that.

Drying your rocks will kill a lot of life on them, and you can probably work around it. The trick with the epoxy is that while it's not very sticky, it's rock hard when it sets - so hard that if you ever have to dig it out of a hole you'll probably break your rock before the epoxy. So it's difficult to build anything that relies solely on the epoxy to hold a shape, but if you use it to just stabilize an aquascape it does a great job. Just stick it between any spot where two rocks touch and by the next day they should be stuck.

I'm not a fan of glue for anything but frags because it's a very light bond. The stuff I use sets in 5 minutes, and will keep any frag from being dislogged by waterflow, but I can also just reach in and snap them off the rock. It's handy that way, but it's also brittle.

The other option is drill the rocks and use fiberglass rods to hold the 'scape you want. The rocks should be very easy to drill.

 

[sharat]

http://s1216.photobucket.com/albums/dd374/Ingram8110/?action=view&current=IMAG0029.jpg


Ok this is rebuild what do you all think. looks less cluttered to me. but about the best ic an do with the rocks i have