Dry rock curing, in RO/DI only?

[HM3105]

And that's a good thing?

 

It makes me feel better, I'll test it tomorrow and then dose some lanthanum chloride and see what happens.

[HM3105]

And that's a good thing?

 

 

I think the consensus going is that when you submerge those rocks uncured (cured in this case meaning no po4 leaching vs setting in bacteria for the cycle, im following you there) the bacteria begin slowly liberating it from the rock matrix if its there, via digestion as they feed on surfaces, then algae typically gains a foothold and blocks coralline from taking hold. if the organic reserve on the rocks had additional dried worms and plants, things you removed, then the tiny holdfasts they used were still in the rocks and the acid would've cut that layer off vs waiting for natural bio degrading

 

im not sure how required any of this is, just considering the threads from RHF and the problem algae marco rocks threads, I do think po4 plays a role in those types of rocks and there were various ways of mitigating it, the slowest being the unassisted curing process.

 

personally id mortar and pestle some samples into a powder and test that after leaving in a cup of sample water a few days to see if its higher in po4 it would be neat to see results

 

if you were able to lock any po4 in that rock outer layer in coralline and make it bio unavail then maybe the stripping wouldn't be needed. but if the theory is right that only the outermost layers hold the po4 in the caco3 matrix then stripping addresses that in a timely manner. the time it would take for the rocks to coat in coralline would be a long time of po4 leaking from the surface, for algae that already want to take over since there's no coralline to exclude them.

 

in the big problem algae threads we saw lots of entrants posting problems with uncured marco rocks, but cycled ones. though I only deal in purple live rock, we must've seen 1000 marco rocks tanks that skipped curing (for po4, not nitrification curing) and planted corals too early. corals thrived but algae did too really badly, per their posts it seems.

 

I think those rocks ideally should be dark vat cooked with heating and circulation (which fosters the supposed bac they'll see in the tank that liberates the po4) for a long time if not acid etched. the cooking gives the organics missed in scraping time to degrade, and turn loose, and it gives the bac time to seed in the rock and start digesting the layers free of po4, its variable on how long it runs to get to an ideal state. we'd sure need accurate test kits to know.

 

the acid bath speeds that up to five mins... but only if we buy the theory that caco3 holds in po4 that was outputted in close proximity. Ive never tested that to know, but its surely the going theory lol. the scrapable items for sure had waste within them and you got the bulk of that already.

 

So, going on several weeks. The highest Po4 I read was 0.098. The lowest has been 0.028 which was 4 days ago. I checked it today, the reading was Po4 0.034. So in 4 days my phosphates only increased 0.006. It has been colder though and as I mentioned before I'm not heating it at the moment. I am planning to add a heater this week though so we'll see if that causes my Po4 to increase at a faster rate.

 

If the above is correct, the increased heat should result in faster bacterial growth which should result in faster release of Po4 correct?

[seabass]

If the above is correct, the increased heat should result in faster bacterial growth which should result in faster release of Po4 correct?

Only if there is organic material still left to broken down. And I suspect that the rate of increase (if any) would be minimal.

 

I would change out all of the water (theoretically bringing phosphate back down to zero). Then I'd monitor any increases from there. However, it doesn't look like phosphate leaching from the rocks is going to be a major problem for you.