live rock seeding

[greatgman]

hi all
the question i'm asking is:
how long does it take to get base rock live?
i'm going to be doing lots of work to my tank in the next month
amd what i am going to do is :
in a big rubbermaid tote :
put about 150 lbs of base rock (hirocks.com)
and about 30-50 lbs of live rock(liverock.com) together
how long would i have to wait to get the base rock to be live?
and what else do i need to do ?(water changes,circulation,etc)
any advice will be greatly apreciated
maybe a few kudos will be given.

thanks all

 

[clowninround]

There base rock IS live rock, they just call it base rock cuz it dosen't have as much corraline or not "choice" pieces. When I looked in there bins, I did not see a whole lot of difference personally...and it all came straight out of the ocean and they have 3 main bins of saltwater running...live crawling everywhere, infact I made my hubby pick up the pieces for fear of waht might crawls on my hands lol. A little off the topic, but they had a HUGE lobster in there as a pet...after I saw that I was NOT getting my hands in there to dig around, like I said, I let my husband do that . Anyways, do not worry about the base, it is live and it's good stuff.

 

[clowninround]

opps...I saw now that you were speaking of hirocks....in that case my hirocks was covered in corraline at the months end.

 

[Bearfan]

You're going to definately need lighting if you want to keep the corraline growing and alive. You'll need circulation to prevent algae growth in the dead spots and to encourage the spread of the benefical bacteria and coralline. You'll need to heat it. Water changes will depend on how cured your LR is.

 

[MYTY1705]

I thought the hi-rocks was dry rock from hawaii?

If so it it dry and has no life on it. The bacteria from the live rock will have to colonate the base over a period of time. But this still is only basic live rock. The premium live rock has the algae, sponges and other live stuff on it that most people think of as live rock. I would say for it to become a useable rock for filtration purposes like I think ou are wanting it for, I would say probably 3-4 weeks as long as you feed the bacteria.

The rock must be kept like your tank would be salinity, flow and temp wise to keep the bactria alive. I read that you can actually put pure amania hydroxide in small doses into the water to act as a fertilizer of sorts for the bacteria. Adjust the ammount of ammonia to be about 5 ppm in the tub (only with small ammounts of the currnt live rock that you have, you don't want to kill it off.) With that ammount of ammonia it will encourage the bactria to reproduce at prodigeous rates and give you a quicker bacteria bloom than you woul have just putting flake food in.

I hope this helps you, and that this is the information you were looking for.

 

[clowninround]

Question, why are you putting it in a tub? To cure it? The hirocks all you have to do is rinse of real good and put it in your tank. There are alot of different opinions,
but if you see no visible die off you should be able to put LR.com rocks straight in your tank too.

 

[greatgman]

the reason i'm putting it in a tub is
while i do the work on my tank the rock will be seeding
it will take me about a month or a bit longer to
1 rebuild my tank stand
2 get my lighting system worked out
3 construct my closed loop wave maker
4 finish my canopy
etc
i only get 1day off a week and 1 short day (6 hrs)
so i want to have it seeding the base while i do the other stuff

 

[greatgman]

so i should feed flake to the tub for bacteria growth (food) ???

 

[cmor1701d]

so i should feed flake to the tub for bacteria growth (food) ???

Yes. Just a small pich every few days. Keep checking your levels too. You wil probably need to add some make-up water to keep the SG at the same level. Keep an eye on the other params too (pH, Am, NO2/NO3) so that it does not get too far out of line.