Cooking Rock / Going BB / Curing New Rock

[mattsilvester]

Ok guys – here is another unusual one. Without going into too much detail, I have decided to go BB in my 240 gal tank. As part of that, I am “cooking� my rock (about 120lbs of it). Simultaneously, I am curing about 60lbs of freshly imported fiji LR in a separate tank. The reason I have 60lbs or new rock is because I swapped out some cured pieces for some fresh pieces in order to infuse the rock with new life (for some unknown reasons my previous LR was pretty devoid of critter life).

My uncured rock has been curing now since Saturday (5 days). The first day I picked off all the smelly stuff, then put it into water. The following morning (12hrs later) I gave the new rock a good blast with a power head, then removed it all, totally emptied the tank, fill up with clean tank water (from display) and put the rock back in, with an old skimmer and a couple of power heads. 5 days later, I have zero ammonia and 0.3ppm nitirite…… which I think is pretty good considering the tank is just an 18� cube (25 gals) and there is 30lbs of fresh LR in there.

So… what I am thinking on doing is getting the un-cured rock out, going over it again picking off anything dead or dying, give it a good rinse, and then combine it with my “cured� rock that I am cooking – the idea being that the old mature cured rock will effetively “filter� out the small amount of nitrite remaining, thus preserving maximimum life on the new uncured rock. Simultaneously, I will get good critter migration & integration between old rock and new. It will be 6 weeks before I can transfer my LR back to my display tank.

The reason I am doing all this now is simple. My fish have ich, but are too big / too many to treat in hospital tanks, so they are benig hypo’d in the display….. which incidentally is working out well for me so far, and has about 6 weeks to go. So, I am going to take my phosphate reactor off my main tank and hook it up with the combined curing / cooking tank to ensure I get as much nasties out as possible. I am also going to hook up a canister filter, with carbon to the curing / cooking tank to ensure no nasties get absorded into it….. and to help any nasties already in it to be drawn out. When the time comes to transfer all the rock back to the tank I will have done several large waterchanges to get the sg. back up, so phosphate in the display will, by then, be negligible once again. I would also look at swapping the phosphate eractor back to the display maybe a week before the LR goes back in….. to polish things up.

So…… basically I would like to hear comments / thoughts on my proposal?

[mattsilvester]

No one got any thoughts? I think I am going to go ahead and just do it this after noon...... can't see any real reason why not to.

Cheers,

Matt