cooking rock and corral skeletons ?

[TekCat]

Recently I aquired some dead rock and SPS skeletons collected from Hawaiian beaches. They are quite dirty. I plan to turn them into LR. Does anyone know the best way to cook/cure them so I can put them in my sump?

[salty65gal]

Depending on how dead they are. If there will be some die off, put them into some type of container with fresh salt water, heater and ideally a pump for water movement and a light and skimmer. You could do it without the skimmer but would be much faster with, and you'd have to do much less water changes. All you have to do is keep it in there until it's stabilized. Ammonia at 0, Nitrite at 0, and Nitrate at 0.

[kjdeut]

Curing rock is what Salty65 described. Cooking rock is another method of curing but there is a lot more messing around then doing the method described by Salty. From what a read cooking is like repeating the curing/cleaning process over and over until all dead material and pretty much anything else is removed. There are some threads on Reef Central on the cooking process.

Ken

[Graham]

Cooking is indeed like curing, only it is done in the dark. Curing is usually intended to preserve as much life on the rock as possible. Cooking gets rid of pretty much anything photosynthetic. It is bacteria-driven, while curing is algae-driven. Aside from zero nutrient parameters, the main thing with cooking is that you want to make sure there's nothing left to "come out of" the rock.

Basically, you put your rocks into a container as described above. Skim the water heavy, heat to temp and give it no light. After a week, remove the water and put it into buckets. Take each piece of rock out and dunk it several times in the old water. It helps to have a series of like 4 buckets or so, as the first will get real dirty and then less as you dunk down the line.

Fill the cooking tank up with newly mixed water, put the rock back in, and wait another week. Once you get to the end of a week and there's no appreciable detritus on the bottom of the cooking tank and not much comes out when you dunk, your rock is as "clean" as it will be.