I did a turkey baster cleaning on each rock and vacuumed up the detritus every week with a 20% water change. It took 3 months for the rocks to get tidy even though they were supposed to be "almost cured". Keep those powerheads going to flow the junk out and then get it out of the tank. One thing that also helped was a big cheesecloth sack of floss in there that I threw away after it got nasty.

Did you do a saline or fw dip to get hitchhikers out?

Also, feel around each rock..any soft spots are sponges or something that will turn skank on you and I used a butter knife to scrape that stuff off.

There is a lot of talk out there about not letting detritus build up or you will have problems later and I have an Argonite bed so Hoover it was.

Others have different theories but I did not want any junk hanging out.

Phishnoob :beer:

 

Hey thanks for the quick reply! The rock I bought was pretty well cured I think except for one piece, it's covered in pink algea and I have little bugs hatching out already after three days. I started out by using tap water until I can afford a RO filter but the nitrate has gone down a bit and I haven't seen any measurable nitrite yet, although I don't have ammonia test yet either. But I do plan on waiting a while before adding any fish just to be safe. My concern is if the rock was so well cured that it doesn't make any ammonia then my BAK PAK won't get cycled. So I guess I'll turn the power heads back on, I've been blasting them with two 402s but turned them off today just to see what would happen. Pretty excited to see creepy crawlies I just hope they're nice bugs!

Oh yeah anyone know if my 402 could power the Bak Pak or should I stick to lower power maxijet?

 

cycling a tank is getting the bacterial colonies in large enough numbers so as to be able to process any ammonia that may get into the system. this ammonia can either be by critters or by things dying.

the skimmer is used to remove dissolved organic materials. you want the skimmer to produce a tea coloured liquid. it may take several days before the skimmer starts acting properly.

G~

 

My bak pak has biobale that needs to grow the bacteria, but if the live rocks take care of it all I'm concerned with the biobale not getting any junk for the bacteria to grow on. This is going to be a FOWLER tank, I bought the rocks to help cycle the tank. I'm hoping the rocks will help keep the nitrates down along with water changes because the biobale will probably raise nitrate levels.

 

FOWLR can be set up a little differently. a lot of these type tanks will have bio-balls/bio-bales. these are used because they can quickly break down ammonia into lesser toxic compounds. nitrates are not as toxic to fish as they are to inverts. people tend to stock FOWLR tanks higher so they need the extra ammonia processing power of the bio-stuff.

if your bioload is reasonable than you can remove the bio-stuff and rely only on the LR for the filtration. this can also allow you to go longer between water changes. water changes are used to dilute the nitrates that tend to build up in heavily stocked FOWLR.

G~