nasty rock
 

I have about 300 lbs of rock that was live a month & a half ago. The person I bought the tank from also had the rock. It was covered with palys shrooms & algae. It was all removed straight from the tank & stuck outside dirty to dry.
My question is, how is the best way to clean this stuff up? I have thought of using a prtessure washer & blasting off a bunch of the nasty chunks of junk & then proceed to slowly cure it as recomended by Myka's thread. In the stage this rock is on now do I still need to use saltwater for it or would it be ok to just use freshwater & give constant flushes until it gets to a stage not as foul as it is now.
Cheers!

Put the rock in the container and use a tooth brush to clean them. Thats the way I clean them if needed. If it's really bad... siphon salt water into a container... put the rock in the container and clean it there.. then put it back into the tank. Also Turbo snails are pigs and will really work over those rocks. If you can find Mexican Turbos, they eat bubble algae too. I watched a video on youtube about a guy who wants to clean his rock, so he boiled them...I never tried, but i think you can look for it. Good luck!

i think long spined sea urchin will wash ur rocks for you :) i had a small one in my 29g it cleaned up all my alage of rocks and glass

dono if it a good idea to boil, steam, bake or microwave any rock that has palys on it, even if dried up and dead.

Acid bath or vinegar

acid.

I've used it and it's the magic bullet.

http://www.rona.ca/en/pool---muriatic-acid

I second the acid. Just did 50lbs and it worked awesome.

What kind of acid are you talking.g about? I've tried lots lol but never thought I could clean rocks with it :-)

Hydrochloric(muriatic) acid. To do the 50lbs it took me 2 gallons of acid and maybe 4lbs of baking soda to neutralize it. I basically did a couple medium sized peices of rock at a time in an old salt bucket. 9 parts water to 1 part acid. I left all my rock in for about 10 hours at a time. Tested the solutions ph and if in acceptable levels dumped it down the drain, if not add baking soda. Total cost was about $30. If you have any questions you can shoot me a pm.

Trevor

So using the acid will eat off all the rotting matter.
Then follow that up with lots of rinsing.
Does the acid have a residual effect on the rock?
How long should the rock soak for after the acid bath & before entering into the tank?
Do I just start a regular cure on the rock afterwards?
Where is a good place to pick up some of the acid?

1. after treatment throw it in a bucket of tap water and add some baking soda and let sit for an hour or so (get any small pockets of lowered PH water out of the rock)

2. No residual effect but that it will/can change the structure/look of the rock since your throwing a lump of calcium carbonate into acid.

3. I've soaked for different time periods from an hour to overnight. 2-4 hours is good...but depends on what your trying to get off. I've let it go for 10-12 hours for a tough piece and also to experiment. Let the rock soak in tap water and the baking soda for a again a good couple hours...depends on how big the rock might be.

4. Don't need to cure the rock afterwards because it's (should be) 100% dead. What you might want to do is seed the rock to get life growing on it once again.

Ok thank you for the information .
where can I find this stuff?

Had put up a link yesterday of what I've used. ~ $14

Muriatic acid is strong enough to do a lot of damage to your eyes and mucous membranes as well as your skin. Goggles and gloves for sure. Muriatic acid seems a reasonable approach provided you use appropriate safety equipment. I would soak in RODI water first so that the acid isn't soaked up as much. I wouldn't dip it for longer than a couple hours as there is no point in getting the acid all the way to the middle of the rock since you are really only wanting to kill the surface nuisances. This method will essentially strip the outer layer of rock off. You will still need to leech the phosphate and nitrate from the rock by "cooking".

Freshwater is fine through the whole leeching process right up to the point you want to re-seed the rock with some live rock.

Awesome!
thank you all for your advice.

If you dont want to do acid , you can use regular bleach. I bleached 4 buckets full of rock and they all turned out very clean , some had unwanted zoas on them and they vanished with al the algea . I mixed the bleach at 4 to 1 water to bleach , rinse then dry in the sun . Bleach evaporates and leaves only salt behind.