Cooking and Curing Rock....

[hfp75]

Cooking:

Its in a Rubbermaid with some bleach just resting...

http://i101.photobucket.com/albums/m...ps854bd985.jpg

Curing:

Originally Posted by asylumdown

just curious, why did you do the acid first? I sort of always thought the bleach would be the first step, but now that I think about it I realize I don't have an explanation for why I always thought that lol.

Well I did some reading and the order doesn't seem to matter... there are opinions both ways but I found nothing concrete to make me do it either way. I had the acid, so I did that first.

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Well, update, the curing rock really, REALLY stunk for a few days and when I took off the black garbage bag, this is what I saw... weird eh? (anyone know what that white stuff is?)

http://i101.photobucket.com/albums/m...ps53432d88.jpg

I don't now what the white film on the top was but it stank - so I scooped it all out and dumped it.... I took out all the rock (shook it all off, and tried to clean it a bit), it was dark grey in color with some slime (algae) still on it....

http://i101.photobucket.com/albums/m...ps69b68446.jpg

Then I replaced the water with some fresher tank water (did a water change) & put the rocks, power-head, heater and air hose back in....

Couple of more days and we will see what happens... it is still in the dark, to hopefully kill any algae on it and not provide light for more to grow. In the mean time if I can continue with the water changes I might be able to get rid of the NO3 and PO4.

Obviously by the smell there is die off happening and if I dont have enough O2 it is the anaerobic bacteria doing the bulk of the work creating the terrible smell..... don't know if its the die off or anaerobic bacteria .... maybe both