Base Rock

Neenie

Upgrade has arrived people!!
Jan 19, 2007
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Romford, UK
Sorry got a head full of questions today...!

Obviously a cheaper option than buying all LR.. our LFS (ha ha) said that it would be pointless to buy base rock as it leaches nitrates back into the water, they said that the only way to make sure it is ok is to place it in a bucket with a heater and power head and do regular water changes on it, testing the water every other day or so until the nitrate levels etc go down to 0. Now they reckon this could take a long time....

This method would cost money of course with all the water changes and over time would probably cost just as much as if we bought 40kg of LR ??

We were thinking of just building up the base of our new display with baserock maybe just 20 to 30 % of the total rock.. but now not so sure this is a good idea??

Any ideas please
 
I'd go with some base rock and skip the bucket / water change / nitrate leeching process. When we first set up our 90g, about 50% of our rock was base rock. Beyond the initial cycling / new tank syndrome period, we haven't had any problems with nuissance algae or elevated nutrient levels. I didn't go through any of what your LFS has suggested either. We stocked our tank very lightly with fish for the first 8 months or so, partly on purpose because we used so much base rock and partly because we had a hard time finding the fish we wanted in our tank.
 
Hi Subliminal... thanks for the link.. not sure of shipping to UK though?
 
Hi Subliminal, thanks for the link, not sure of shipping costs to the UK though :-)

Still says on there it can leach ammonia etc.. so I guess any base rock will have to be cycled
 
whoops sorry about double posting.. computer playing up me thinks

fsn77 thanks for that.. i think it's definately a cheaper option and if it worked for you... we already have out fish .. they are in QT at the moment. so we would need to cycle the new tank first anyway and add them slowly..
 
haha my reef club raves about that place... i dont see whats so great though personally. I mean yeah its good looking stuff but its still pretty expensive. If you look around you can get cured LR for prices close to what they are asking for there base rock.

Just what i thought about it though.
Jay
 
Well kind of. But live rock is very wet and weighs a heckuva lot more, so lb for lb you're probably going to end up with 2x the rock.

That being said, I've never even seen their rock up close...just heard about it a lot.
 
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