Nuking live rock

[MrGone]

My Dad has some live rock out in the garage out of his tank and wants to start over with it. I really don't think there was much alive on it when he bought it (certainly didn't look like it). The rocks had quite a bit of cyano on them when he pulled them.

He mentioned just scrubbing them followed by a bleach bath but I've heard of people 'cooking' it and figured this would be worthwhile to look into before turning to bleach. What is the process for this? From my limited understanding it is keep it in a tub of aquarium water in the mid 90*F range and I imagine tossing a skimmer on it for a couple weeks?

I'm pretty sure the rock has dried out. I think he just took it out of his tank and left it in totes in his garage.

I'm thinking once it is 'clean' he can put it in my tank and let it seed for a month or two as he prepares to start from scratch on his tank.

Thank you!

 

[lvsuckerfish]

how I did mine is I cooked it thats a waste of time IMO I then added to tubs with bleach alot of bleach 1 cheap walmart brand no scent half a gallon to each tub with a power head I let sit in there moving the power head around every day. then rinsed with the garden hose then let dry out. once mostly dry i added rodi and salt also used water from a water change and put back in the tubs with just a power head and let site for a week or so then added to the tank where it is currently cycling the rock I got was covered in hair algea thats all gone now no scrubbing at all and the big pieces that had most the hair algea is bleached white with out cooking or scrubbing.

IMO cyano is not an issue to cook rock hair algea is more of an issue then cyano! cyano will disapear in a tube with no light and just water movement, without cooking of bleaching it do you have aptisia?

 

[MrGone]

how I did mine is I cooked it thats a waste of time IMO I then added to tubs with bleach alot of bleach 1 cheap walmart brand no scent half a gallon to each tub with a power head I let sit in there moving the power head around every day. then rinsed with the garden hose then let dry out. once mostly dry i added rodi and salt also used water from a water change and put back in the tubs with just a power head and let site for a week or so then added to the tank where it is currently cycling the rock I got was covered in hair algea thats all gone now no scrubbing at all and the big pieces that had most the hair algea is bleached white with out cooking or scrubbing.

IMO cyano is not an issue to cook rock hair algea is more of an issue then cyano! cyano will disapear in a tube with no light and just water movement, without cooking of bleaching it do you have aptisia?

Nope, there really weren't any pests in the tank, no hair algae or aiptasias. Thank you for sharing your experiences!

It sounds like nuking them will be of little benefit and bleaching them is the way to go. I know that is extreme based on what you said but I'd rather start fresh and be extremely thorough from the get go.

 

[lvsuckerfish]

yeah a bleach bath will work great I think I have pics of my tank when I added the rock it looks like marco rock by the time I was done it ill be come live again over time..

and I forgot an important step once in the new salt water add a container of Prime or which ever chlor condition you like in there I just dumped the whole container as for the amount of bleach i add just to be safe.

 

[ac7av]

I did up 600 lb of rock for my tank. I wanted to start out with a clean tank so what I did is actually boil every rock in a crab cooker then used a pressure washer to really clear out the pours of the rock. You should have seen the junk that came out of them. Then dried them in the sun for a few weeks this last summer. The rock was as white as it could get and clean as a whistle. It only took a couple of hours with the crab cooker to do up all the rock and washed as we were going.

 

[MrGone]

ohhhhh!!!! thank you, I would have overlooked that, thanks a bunch!

 

[lvsuckerfish]

not a problem just tring to save you time

 

[Madmike]

You might want to give it a muriatic acid bath first to wash away the first layer of rock, helps with the trapped phosphates.