Dry rock cycle
 

The rock I ordered from you arrived, and I have to say it's amazing stuff, light, porous, interesting shapes - I wish I'd been able to start out with this stuff instead of that unpleasant DIY rock that I'm replacing.
Shipping was fast too - ordered on Saturday night, here Wednesday.
While I was messing around working out how to aquascape it, a desicated and very dead little red crab fell out - that's how you know it's the real thing! :biggrin:

It set me wondering what sort of a cycle you typically get from this stuff - are there a lot of organics in it to decay, or is it pretty clean? I ask because it's replacing all the rock in my display, and I want to be sure I have enough older rock in my sump to deal with any extra temporary bio load from the rock as well as that from the current inhabitants.

Thanks,
Rob.

Rob, Eli has some good cycle methods. Hopefully he will chime in here. Mines all different rock from him, all dry of course. I have it currently in tubs with fresh water and large powerheads, hopefully cleaning.

Then I will dryscape my tank. After add my water. Eli said keep it fairly dark for several weeks but I dont think thats your case? Im also using Prodibio start up for my tank. I use regular Prodibio in my 20g now.

I will still let it cycle for a month anyways. Thats kind of my plan.

Hello Rob
Glad you received the order with my pick and hope you enjoy aqua-scaping.
There are couple ways to cure the rock with minimal to no issues with inhabitants of your system.
The rock has some decay and will take roughly 2 to 3 weeks in cycling for ammonia readout to 0.And it goes as fast as 7 to 10 days if live rock or tank water is added to the cycling stage.
I will tonight have a full post on cycling fijireefrock.com

I did mine a little differently.
For my rock I had roughly 150 pounds of live rock in my system, then I added 204 pounds of dry rock.
I had roughly 2-3 days of higher ammonia. it went away and I had no algae issues.
My fish and corals did Great.

In about 2 weeks I'm adding another 400+ pounds right into the display.
As I have been doing tests with the rock. I'm am very impressed on how little it takes to cycle.
With live rock and/or water from your display.


If your starting 100% fresh.
It takes about 3-5 days for the ammonia to really kick in then 9-11 days for the bacteria to kick in and then eat up all the ammonia.
Once the ammonia level hits 0.
Your good to go put it in your display in my opinion.
I'll try to get some pics of mine up this weekend.

Thanks for the advice on curing the rock, cured faster than expected, got it in the tank on Boxing Day, looks great. Now all i need is more coral...

Glad to hear your licking the rock and the cycle recipe:thumb: now lets get on the pictures:biggrin:

Ok, I'm not the most imaginative when it comes to aquascaping, but here it is..
No kidding that there are lots of hiding places for fish, you'd never know there are actually seven of them in there!

http://www.mts.net/~sempers/FTS281213.jpg

Try standing some of these rocks and tune down the lighting as its best to get it ramped up slowly:biggrin:

I have a reduced lighting sketch for the Arduino coded up already, a pain in the ass to get it on there because I don't have an RTC yet so I'm having to send it a time from the command prompt on the iMac, then somehow keep it alive with a 9v battery until I can get it plugged into power down in the basement.. :biggrin: