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Live rock from 15 years ago


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So I have been thinking about making a return to reefing for the last year so. Finally went ahead and made my old rock wet again. Will be interesting to see where it goes.

 

 

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This won't be the actual set up. Just a 30 long with a heater and old hob filter. Have an old 150w mh over it at the moment. My last tanks were broken down around 2007. Rock was put in a Rubbermaid damp and sat in my basement since then. Figured I would start the rock while building the real system.

 

Looking at an innovative marine 50ext.

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RaymondNoodles

Interesting. Wonder what that ammonia spike is going to look like.

 

I acquired some live rock that was dry for an unknown # of years from a LFS. Smelled pretty funky. I was curious to see how the cycle acted.

After 1 week - ammonia 2, nitrites .5

2 weeks - ammonia 3, nitrites 1

3 weeks - ammonia 0, nitrites 0 and nitrates 10-20

So it cycled pretty quick in my opinion, especially without adding any ammonia or jump start such as Dr Tim's. There must have been some significant die off. Also interested to see how quickly the coralline algae returns to the big rock that appears to have had a lot of coralline in a past life.

 

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That's awesome that you are back in the hobby. Good luck with the new build!

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That's interesting that yours seemed to cycle so quick. I have been getting caught up on today's dry rock/bare bottom starts and all of the issues people seem to have today. My guess is rock like this has quite a bit of dormant bacteria just waiting for conditions to be right.

 

I'd say it's been about 3-4 weeks since I have this rock wet again. When I pulled it out of the basement I did lay it out on the driveway and hit it with a pressure washer. This was basically just to get the salt off of it.

Didn't have any funky smells or anything. So far I have done two 10% water changes. The water is a bit cloudy with a slight yellow tint. Was surprised to find the dinky filter/carbon cartridges from today's marineland model are compatible and fit mine from 1999. So running some carbon in the hob. 

Test kits should be here next week. Going to see where things sit and then maybe hit with some turbo start. Might do 100% water change first.

 

I have also been thinking about doing an icp test.

This rock was spread across 3 tanks at the end. Two were fishless and I gave the corals away and shut down. But the biggest crashed over a cracked heater. Thinking the cost of an icp might be worth knowing about any oddities with metals.

 

 

 

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RaymondNoodles

It’s pretty amazing how quickly the coralline started populating. Dormant bacteria for the win! I suspected this and have been wondering, so thank you for sharing the experiment. Please keep updating this thread. 
 

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  • 1 month later...

Figured I'd throw a little update on this. Details on what I actually did and time tables are already a bit fuzzy. But basically had some pretty high levels of ammonia and nitrites. Used 25 gallon dose of turbo start at some point a few weeks back. And let it run through the holidays.

 

So out of curiosity I picked up the Hanna url po4 checker. Most of this rock came out of a 8 year old system that ran a full deep sand bed. Completely expected this rock to be bound in po4. But after a week of testing multiple times per the Hanna checker I am right around .1 ppm po4

Nitrates are maybe .5

 

 So it looked like I have a decent starting point so I picked up a few cheap frags. Got a small trumpet frag and a micromussa frag in there for the past few weeks. Been adding some pod/phyto combo from my local shop to get things rolling. Things are looking good. However about a week after the frags went in the diatoms showed up. So watching a pretty thick diatom bloom run its course right now.

 

Nothing real exciting. But it's progress I suppose. My biggest challenge is accepting this dry rock start.. just to sterile. Even though I took it this far.. I am very much considering some gulf rock from kp aquatics when I start the real tank.

 

 

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