Making live rock live again......

[reddhaus]

I am looking for some thoughts on this. My Dad is thinking about starting a fish only with live rock tank. It will be his first venture into salt. Needless to say, he is sort of stand-off-ish. He has had freshwater tanks since I was very young so he is very familiar with aquariums and such. He is just stuck under the idea that saltwater is so hard to take care of and so expensive and so on. My brother has been involved in salt for around 6 years and I have been for about 1. We have been showing him our setups and explaining that it is only as "difficult" or "easy" as you make it. He is starting to come around as of late, which brings me to my question:

He has some old dried up live rock in his basement from one of my brothers old setups. He asked me if we could clean it up real good and use it in his tank if he decides to set one up. I came up with two options.

The first option would be to clean up the old stuff as well as we could and then place it in my tank or refugium to re-seed. What would the best method of cleaning be before placing it in my tank to be "restarted"? Also, would I be opening myself up for a potential disaster of some sort by attempting this?

The second option would be to clean up the old stuff as mentioned above but then just placing it in his new tank and purchasing a few chunks of live rock from the LFS to get things started. It seems to me there would be less risk to my system with this option.

Any opinions or experience on this would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!!

[Reefer769]

i would say mix up a bucket of salt water, make sure the salinity, and temp are right(salinity-1.024, temp-80). once you have that set up, rinse the rock off in the tub of saltwater with a small powerhead, you can do this by blowing the water that comes out of the powerhead at the rock, and do this untill there is no more dust and it seems clean, then i would say place all the rock in a seperate container and let it "cure" for a while(a month or 2) before placing it in your tank. im not sure of all the details on how to cure rock, but im sure someone else will be glad to tell you.

[Poseidon]

Hey Scott!!!

Forgive Reefer, he is still quite new. There is no need for you to place the rock in a seperate container to cure. If it has been sitting in the basement dry, then what you have is BASE ROCK. I would clean it up, but I would use a SHOP VAC!!! Get as much of the loose stuff off as you can. Then to the garden hose for a thourough rinsing. From there straight to your Dad's tank. Then I would go buy 10-20 lbs of live rock from Tropicorium, (like you need an excuse to go there) I would get a lot of small rocks, that way you can spread them around the base rock you already have. Make sure the Ca and Alk levels are up to snuff, and in a month or so you will have some nice Coralline covered rock!!! I used this method with some "lace rock" I purchased down there at Tropicorium. At 1.69 per pound, it is WAY cheaper to buy then true live rock at 7.99 per pound. And here is the cool part, after a month or 2 you can't tell the difference at all, at least in color.

[Reefer769]

oookay, well i thought i had the right idea...


SORRY

[Leddy]

i used base rock as well, 50 out of the 100lbs to be exact. now it is starting to get coraline buds on it, spreading slowly. the LFS i go to, every tank has a majority of base rock, with live rock on top of it. you cannot tell the difference at all. after a while with the "live" live rock, beneficial bacteria should colonize that old live rock of yours. poseidon is right though, use that old live rock as a base to build and scape the new live rock on. good luck, have fun.


leddy

[reddhaus]

Thanks for the input. I think this is what I will suggest we do for my Dad's tank. I will post later and try to show some pics.