Cured Rock - cycling

[Fede-Hanover]

Hi, I'm setting up a 20 gallon tank in my office. I was going to cycle it with live sand, un-cured LR, and Bio spira. However, I'm afraid that curing the live rock will bring bad smell to the office. The cured LR shipping takes 1 day.

My questions are: can i introduced LR while cycling? Is it better to cure LR at home? Does fiji rock smell that bad while curing it?

Thanks a lot. I spent 4 months researching (only freshwater experience), but there are certain things that I still have doubts.

Fede

 

[Breakthecycle2]

My recommendation is to always cycle with fully cured live rock. Most of the time, you will not even cycle because of the bacteria on the rock. I'm on my third tank in 4 months and this has been my observation.

 

[Fede-Hanover]

Thanks for the feedback. I follow your advice and everything went ok.

Here is the post with pics: http://www.aquariumadvice.com/forums/f101/innovative-marine-16-nuvo-first-sw-tank-262725.html

Thanks again!

 

[Breakthecycle2]

Great! Did you experience any kind of spikes?

 

[Fede-Hanover]

Yes. I measured everything each 4 hours.

1) The ammonia spike was fast. In less than 20 hours it went back to .25 and 0 at the end of the cycle.
2) The nitrite took longer, 3 days to go down. The weird thing (at least for me), was that they went down to .25 (or less) after the spike; then I did a 25% WC and then they went up again for 24hs more (I don't have nitrites in my tap water).

No everything looks stable. Just trying to guess what to do with my protein skimmer.

 

[Breakthecycle2]

Keeping stable levels in my Nuvo 16 was a pain in the butt. It wasn't until I added more live rock that everything leveled off in a matter of hours.

 

[Fede-Hanover]

That's good to know. I have 17 pounds of Reel Reef LR. For know everything looks good. Brown diatoms started to appear.

 

[dmolavi]

I cured the rock, and used an uncooked cocktail shrimp to help with the cycle. It didn't stink too badly, but I put a bag of SeaChem Matrix Carbon in the tank (and ran 3 pumps to circulate the heck out of the water), and the stink disappeared within the day.