What's a disadvantage/advantage of using dry rock?

[Bruce51]

I'm using 50 pounds of marco rocks and 30 pounds of figi dry rocks, going to add about 10 to 15 pounds of live rock from 3 different lfs. I spent 12 months curing the marco and figi rocks after a muriatic acid bath to help battle the phosphate issues.

 

[LuizW13]

You could also use bacteria additives to help establish a bacteria population when using dry rock . I used brightwell aqautics bacteria and never even saw an ammonia reading during the initial cycle.

 

[Valentini89]

I guess I just got lucky with the 33 lbs of live rock I bought at a LFS.. the only thing I saw come off was a little starfish that escaped the tank and was never seen again.

 

[AlSimmons]

For those that are avoiding live rock due to the pests, I hope you QT everything else from now on. These pests just don't come in on the rocks sometimes. The smallest hole, the smallest crevice could bring bad news unfortunately. It's almost folly not too if your scared...

I use and always will use LIVE rock btw...

 

[adam82]

Dry rock if placed directly into the tank without conditioning can bring you phosphate (algae-food) and go on delivering it for more than a year---depending on the rock. Some has a major load of it, some doesn't. This means you're going to be wedded to a GFO reactor for some rock, and there's no visual way to tell how bad it will be. Conditioning rock is a matter of tubbing it for a lengthy time, (see the sticky) and if you put your piece of live rock in during that process, its bacteria and non-photosynthetic life will go ahead and spread through the rock. Using unconditioned dry rock from some sources can give you huge algae problems.

so.......... if one were to add said dry rock without conditioning (oops) how would one deal with the algae problems?

 

[snowlynx]

What is the time frame for 'dry rock' to leach out phosphates, weeks, months?

I'm using caribsea arag rock mainly for the price, looks nice and lots of holes in it
Just rinsed and put in the tank per instructions

 

[Sk8r]

IT can take months. Depends how much it had to start with.