Curing Rock

[psiico]

Here's some shots of a piece of rock I cured:

This is day 5:


This is day 12:


This is day 26:


The whole process was done with 12 hour days and two 18 watt NO 5500k. The pods did most of the cleaning, as stated above. I added some crabs and snails on day 16. Just about all the red coralline is gone but there's lots of green growing and that patch of maroon survived and is spreading onto some reef rock.

Just one person's experiance.

[Beverly]

Originally Posted by psiico

Just about all the red coralline is gone but there's lots of green growing and that patch of maroon survived and is spreading onto some reef rock.

Now is the perfect time to test calcium and alk levels. Raising calcium levels, if they have been depleted during the curing process will bring back your coraline algae. Wish I had paid more attention to alk and calcium when I was setting up all my tanks. I'm sure I would have a lot more coraline now if I had.

Here's a great article on alk and calcium:

http://www.advancedaquarist.com/issues/nov2002/chem.htm

[psiico]

Yep, I've been working on Ca and Alk for the past month. I'm using aragocrete and reef rock and using that one piece to seed them so I had to. Just an experiment. I'm going to add some more liverock, though, I want some purple in there, and I'm making more aragocrete.

Here's a closeup of just how nasty that rock was. All I did to clean it was siphon the substrate clean once a week.