Why is live rock so preferred for filtration?

The idea is the bacteria eats all the stuff that would cause it to clog up... that is the idea anyway.. the reality is that live rock does clog up and needs to be cleaned or else it becomes a nitrate/phosphate sponge in the tank. That said, in a SW tank there is A LOT more flow than in a normal FW tank, so it doesn't clog as much since the flow does a pretty good job keeping it clean. Still, every time I do a water change I get out the turkey baster and blow into the rocks to get the junk out of it and there is always quite a bit of stuff that comes out of the rocks.

^yep. There are plenty of large sump saltwater systems out there as well (some larger than the display).

So, to get more into detail. Ace25, you said you use a 'turkey baster' (idk what that is, haha) to clean out your live rock and you do it every time you do a water change.

What other ways is there to clean live rock? And could you do it every 2wks?

Sploke said:

Another option is to use a powerhead and just move it around using the flow to dust off the rocks in the tank.

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^ Yup. That's what I always did. Easier than the turkey baster method.

I had to do this anyway because I had fish that would pick up sand and drop it all over everything. Good for turning over the sand bed, but they were messy.

a turkey baster is a tube with one open end and the other end has a rubber ball attached to it so you can suction and blow
its used to baste turkeys (ya know so they arent so dry when you eat it)
can be bought in walmart or wherever you prefer thats similar

As for why everyone uses live rock and deep sand beds.

I actually think it might be a social phenomenon. It seems to me that it was really about 6 or 7 years ago that the live rock/dsb approach took off. Before that it seemed that everyone I knew relied on protein skimmers to keep their marine tanks clean. I think it was because about that time that a bunch of articles were published in the various reef magazines about using biological versus technological strategies to keep marine tanks clean. It was also about that time that I noticed people starting to use refugiums packed with caulerpa.

Also, I think live rock is sort of pretty - when it gets covered with coralline algae.

It's been much longer than 6-7 years. "Natural" methods have been around for well over 20 years now. They weren't always this popular, but they were definitely around. Heck, IMO, some of the best methods of dissolved waste processing (nitrogen and phosphorus) have been around since the late 70s/early 80s, though they have evolved somewhat since then (e.g. algal turf scrubbers). Live rock and sand are just another piece of the figurative puzzle.

Hi Amphiprion,
What you said is clearly true - natural methods have been around for a while. I was just noting that it seems to me that it was in the last 6 or 7 years that they became really popular.

The way I remember it was that if you looked at marine tanks more than 10 years ago most of the time you saw really empty sterile tanks that were hooked up to protein skimmers and UV systems. Then around 6 or 7 years ago there were all those articles about live rock and deep sand beds, after that pretty much everyone had tanks that started looking really organic filled up with rock and sand.

I was working at my LFS at the time and I remember the groundswell of change taking place. When I first started working at the store - there were a few marine folks who bought live rock, big bags of aragonite, and caulerpa but most people bought fancy skimmers. Then in about a space of a year everything changed and we couldn't keep live rock and caulerpa in stock. We even ended up changing the stores marine system from a skimmer/UV one to one using a big live rock/caulerpa filled refugium.