frozen LR

[bignose]

I got free LR from someone today but it was frozen. How do I clean and reseed this rock so it can be used again?

[Trigger Man]

You will need to buy some cured live rock or borrow some from a friend for a bit. The organisms will populate the rock you currently bought. With the rock you just bought try to clean off all the dead matter, because this will negativly affect your water parameters.

[bignose]

I have a spare tank that I was thinking of putting the rock in. when I put the rock in how hot should I have the heat? I also have a 10G tank with 13 pnds of rock, I could take a couple of pnds out of there to put in the 55G.

[Trigger Man]

Good idea, take the frozen rock and put it into the spare tank. You could run the heat of the tank in the 70's. There will probably be some dieoff due to the fact that the rock as frozen, so by using the spare tank it will not affect your current tanks water parameters. Give it a bit then use some seed rock (rock that currently has organisms growing on it -sounds like you have some in a 10 g tank-). The seed rock will allow for organisms to populate over to the other rocks.

[fkshiu]

Frozen live rock? WTF????

[bignose]

long story. To make things simple his friend killed his tank while he was out of town.

[Keri]

Frozen live rock? WTF????

Oh yeah tastes just like fresh!! *grin*

[bv_reefer]

frozen live rock? ok definitely a first...

[bignose]

I have the rock in a 55Gtank waiting for the tank to stabalize.then I'm going to add some matured rock to it.

[bignose]

This smells horrible! my house reeks of watery death. I've been changing the water every 2 hours or so to try and keep the smell down.

One quick question: I am circulating with fresh water right now until all the dead stuff falls out of the rock. Is this right or should I be using SW the whole time? The rock is dead I didn't think it would hurt anything!
Does it matter if I'm not using a light?

[Trigger Man]

If you use SW then some of the organisms on the rock may survive.

[Trigger Man]

Oh ya, you don't need to use a light while cycling, this could cause algae to start to bloom.

[fkshiu]

This smells horrible! my house reeks of watery death. I've been changing the water every 2 hours or so to try and keep the smell down.

One quick question: I am circulating with fresh water right now until all the dead stuff falls out of the rock. Is this right or should I be using SW the whole time? The rock is dead I didn't think it would hurt anything!
Does it matter if I'm not using a light?

Any rock where there's been a lot of die-off will stink to high heaven as it is re-cycling. Putting it in a Rubbermaid bin in your garage would probably have been less nasty.

You should definitely keep using SW as the ammonia given off by the dead stuff will help feed and repopulate the nitrifying bacertia.

In hindsight, after the tank was "killed" if you friend simply left it in SW in a Rubbermaid in a garage with a powerhead running - you probably don't even need a heater unless it's the dead of winter - the live rock would have stayed quite "live" for a long, long time. Live rock is surpringly tough and resilient. Freezing it just killed everything and took up freezer space.

[bignose]

The rock was left out a couple of days ago. I'm guessing it was -5c outside.

Another thing I learned about LR was the amount of bristle worms in them. I've cleaned out the tank twice and I've sucked up tons of the worms. Kinda gross lol!

[hecks220]

Those rocks are write offs! Man how did he kill the tank...curious to know so you can prevent one of our tank sitters from @$##in up!

[bignose]

Yeah I would be ****ed also! Anyways I'm just going to try to seed the rock again. Don't know if it will work but if it does I will save alot of money. In the SW hobby you can spend alot! All I can do is try eh!

[Marlin65]

It will work I started with mostly dead rock and it is full of life now after 6 months.

[bignose]

It's been 3 days now and I've changed the water 4 or 5 times. The smell is not near as bad as it was at first. Plus I moved the rock in to a rubbermaid container. I hate apartments I wish I had a garage for this stench!
Anyways going to do one more water change then add some live rock from my 10G tank.

[brizzo]

Mmm, I like the smell of fresh un-cured rock :)

[bignose]

made my girlfriend gag!!

[Quinn]

Assuming you've done this by now, but if you're trying to reseed the rock, you would want to do that in salt water. If you're trying to clean it, well, there are a number of ways to do that.

[bignose]

I scrubbed the rock and had 4 powerheads on it for 5 days. I changed the water everyday. I have it in SW now and I'm going to add a couple of pnds of rock from my established tank.