Cleaning live rock

gomrjoe

gomrjoe

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May 22, 2006
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Miami, FL.
I want to take out my live rock and clean it of the dreaded hair algae that still remains and I had an idea that I wanted to get some input on.

I was thinking of taking a pieces out and washing them with a high pressure garden hose, using tap water of course. I figure this should help get a lot of the algae off. I could then mix a couple gallons of salt water and rinse them prior to putting them back in my tank. This seems like it should work, since I will not be soaking the rock in tap water for any length of time.

I have also read about boiling, but that seems drastic???

Any advice or other ideas to rid my live rock of this nemesis is welcome.
 
If the rock has nothing but hair algae on it, you could put it in a plastic trash can that comes with a lid and add a heater and power head to the saltwater. The hair algae will die without the light, but the bacteria in the rock will still be alive.
If there are corals you want to keep on the rock, you'll have to pull the hair off or scrub it off with a brush in a saltwater bath. There also the fish route depending on what you already have in the tank. And of course something in the water is feeding the hair algae or old lighting shifted to the red spectrum, etc. We need a little more info about your setup.
 
I'd just reduce the nutrients in the tank and get some more critters to eat the hair algae. What sort of critters do you have in the tank? What do you have in your clean up crew. If you take the rocks out and wash in fresh water or God forbid boil you'll kill everything in the rocks including the good bacteria and most of your copepods .

hth
Chris
 
After reading a bunch of articles going both ways on the topic I decided to split my rock into to methods of treating the problem. I put half my rock into a large garbage can with a powerhead and a lid to keep it completely dark. This will kill the algae on that batch, I figure I will leave it like that for about 8 or 9 days to be safe.

The other half of my rock I mixed up some low salinity water and scrubbed them with a toothbrush and rinsed them in the saltwater. I have two pieces of rock that I could not scrub or place in the garbage can because they have my softies growing on them. I just took those and scraped them with my net as best as I could and then shook them, capturing what I could with my net and turning my Protein Skimmer to full power.

Current cleanup crew: about a dozen turbos, 25-30 blue-legged crabs, 1 sand sifting star, 1 diamond watchman gobie.

Water params: nitrates <20, phosphates undetectable.

I am pretty sure what caused this bloom was a combo of factors that happened about a 1 1/2 months ago. My lights were old, my UV sterilizer burned out, and I had no more hermits. I have since cleaned up all of this and my phosphates are again undetectable. But I never clean the rock thinking that it would just completely die off, I think that was my mistake. I believe my nitrates, while not off the charts were allowing my hair algae to continue to grow, just very slowly.

I am going to load up on some more hermits this weekend.

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100 gal tank, 3.8 wpg pc lighting
35 gal wet/dry/sump
Protein Skimmer
UV Sterilizer
2-3 dsb
mated pair perc clowns
1 yellow tang
1 pac blue tang
1 coral beauty
1 diamond watchman goby
3 reef chromis
3 spotted cardinal fish
current cleanup crew: 15 turbos, 35 blue leg hermits
Inverts: star polyp, yellow colony polyp, bubble coral, pulsing xenia
 
IMO, I'd go for hermits the hermits sure but, I'd also go with a larger variety and number of snails and maybe tiger tail sea cuc. They will really help lock up a lot of nutrients the tiger tail will get pretty big but, they have a low metabolic rate so won't add too much to your tanks load. The snails imo will give you a whole lot more bang for the buck.
fwiw
chris
 
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