hey again,
building out the 120 reef but want to minimize impact to natual reefs so want to go with man made rock. does the GARF stuff work OK? are there other options?
thank you for your time
When I tried to get up my first reef tank (around 4 years ago), I made my own Aragocrete and custom "background" to look like natural caves. It took forever to make, but man was I proud of how great it looked when I finished-- and that was without any coral or coraline.
I cured it for around 4 months...did a ridiculous number of water changes, and after it all still couldn't even keep a damsel alive. I finally ended up hauling it to the curb.
This time around I've made about every mistake a newbie reefer can make (but had real rock), and have only lost a handful of sps frags, everything else is doing great...so I definitely blame the home made rock for my past failure.
I'm not saying it's not a great idea, and for all I know I just happened to get something in my cement mix that wouldn't normally be there...but I followed the instructions to a T, and it ended up costing me about six months, a perfectly good tank, and a bunch of bags of aragonite for my trouble.
The overall effect you can create by making your own is fantastic, and there are other obvious benefits, like being able to pre-form holes for frag plugs, etc...but all in all I don't think I'd try it again. If you're in a metro area it's easy enough to find cheap rock on craigslist that's already been stolen from the reef and should be recycled.
Others seem to have had a lot more success than me, so YMMV.
(for what it's worth, I was recently told my one of the local shops that any rock purchased from Florida is concrete that's just been sitting in the ocean curing and collecting wildlife... He said there hasn't actually been major rock removal from there in some time (over a decade), but I have no idea how accurate that is).
