I am wanting to add a large piece of Caribsea Life Rock to my established 75 gallon tank. Has anyone done this and have you had any adverse effects from it? A small cycle shouldn’t be too terrible, but I don’t want it to upset anything. I have a mixed tank with a lot of LPS and SPS that I don’t want to lose.
Adding Life Rock to Established System
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vetteguy53081
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Life rock is good and safe But offers no bacterial or buffering abilities
damsels are not mean
Valuable Member
The only adverse effect is you'd have a completely blank piece of rock that algae will easily colonize before most other things do.
ELChingonsReef
Active Member
I'm trying to do the same thing. I need to add more rock to accommodate growing acropora. I put them close together not thinking ahead. Now there growing into each other. I keep my mini colonys on 4 inch disc's so they don't incrust on the base rock. It's easier to movie acropora around when they are not stuck to the base rock but they are getting too big. I need to spread them out. I purchased some of that carib sea tree rock where you get a acrylic stick and mount a bunch of rock to it. It's a cool system but I'm not sure if I want to dump an extra 30lbs of dry rock in my established sps tank . Supposedly you can just add the rock to the tank and it should be okay but that makes me nervous. Sps don't like changes. I'm well aware of that. Has anyone had experience with doing this successfully?
NicholasDRR
Community Member
I've done it several times with the Caribsea rock and have never had an adverse effects on two systems (A 1.5 year old 40 breeder and a 4 month old 80 gallon system. As what basically anyone will tell you, any spot is not already the purple color will be green before any coralline algae grows on it, but this will be the case when any rock.
NicholasDRR
Community Member
I've added the rock before but only the pieces already put together or were just one piece. If you have to build it the glue might make your skimmer go nuts for a few days but it won't make your parameters swing. The only time this would happen is if you were taking 30 lbs. of live rock out and swapping it with the
new dry rock that doesn't have the beneficial bacterial supporting your bio-load.
ELChingonsReef
Active Member
Yea im not taking any rock out of the system. Just adding about 10lbs . I'll probably turn off the skimmer for a few hours at least at first. Probably add 10mls a day of microbacter 7 and see what happens. Hopefully I don't tick off my corals
gbroadbridge
2500 Club Member
I think it's possible that piece will go through a bit of an ugly phase before it settles in.
Can you put it in the sump for a month or so to colonise it before it gets hit with light?
ELChingonsReef
Active Member
My sump is kinda stuffed already. The skimmer a couple reactors . If I can stuff it in there somehow the rock probably wouldn't be completely submerged under water. I wonder if that matters ?
Graemesreef
Active Member
Save 5 or 10 gallons from your next water change and store the rock heated for a month or so.
CABIX_81
Community Member
Question: im thinking the same,
My tank is about a yr old and i have a carbisea liferock nano and want to replace it with my old,, but its in a 5gal bucket cycling for about a month, with ammonia at 0 and nitrite at 5..
heard that it dont matter to put in if thes nitrite but ammonia is 0, what would u do iyo?
