curing dead live rock

[mling]

About 3 months ago, I removed my Aptisia and mohano infested LR, about 200 lbs of them, from 3 tanks.
I left these LR on my deck for 3 mths to make sure nothing is left alive. It is now bleached white and I am sure everything is dead, cells and all.

Now what should I do before I reuse these rocks ?
Will just placing them in a tank that has nothing but a power head and aragonite cure this rock over time ?
Since there is no die off, there won't be any cycle so how would I know when these rocks are safe to use in my primary tank ?

Is there any reason I should not just put this in the primary tank and let it cure there ?

Appreciate any advise.

 

[Anonymous]

The rock will still have some organic matter on it (unless you scrubbed the hell out of it) and though none of it is alive - it will probably cause some sort of cycle.

So yes, place them in a tank w/ a power head. Check for an ammonia spike, I bet you'll have one. Cycle as necessary as bacteria repopulate the rocks.


If not - good for you. Use the rock at your leisure then.

 

[iseeweed]

I purchased dried, bleached "lace rock" for my tank thinking I would never have any issues.
About a day after I added water and got the temp. up, the water turned brown and smelled sooooo bad! It still took about 2 weeks and 2 pounds of carbon to get it clean.
Maybe if you baked the rocks in a pottery glazing oven or something--

 

[Ben1]

I started my tank with dry rock from Marco rocks. It had a lot of dead sponge inside it, best way to clean was to let it rot away in the tank.

 

[Anonymous]

you'll still have a cycle due to the organic matter still clinging to the rocks as stated previously - a way to minimize that would be to scrub/rinse the rock to get whatever loose detritus there may be off the rocks before you put it in your tank...

 

[mling]

Thanks for all the advise.
Would it be necessary to buy some live sand to get things going faster; i.e. repopulate the LR with bateria.
Or would seeding it with aragonite from my primary tank do the same ?

 

[Anonymous]

Thanks for all the advise.
Would it be necessary to buy some live sand to get things going faster; i.e. repopulate the LR with bateria.
Or would seeding it with aragonite from my primary tank do the same ?

Seeding it with sand from your main tank would actually be better. The live sand you can buy from stores ready packed in bags has bacteria in it, but not much more. The sand from your tank will be far more diverse in terms of organisms you'll be adding. My local LFS actually has a service where they give out some of the sand from their tanks for local customers that achieves the same effect for those without existing tanks.

 

[Anonymous]

What the Ape said, or you have a small rock in your existing tank that you can spare use it to seed the reused rock.

 

[Ben1]

Rinsing it can help, but with mine there was dead sponge inside the rock that would not come out in rinsing. Letting it rot out was the only way, didnt matter much to me since I was letting the tank run through an initital cycle anyhow.