hanslanda
Community Member
- Joined
- Nov 14, 2018
- Messages
- 50
- Reaction score
- 17
- What state or country do you live in
- Wisconsin
Intro:
Hello All! I'm actually totally new to the forum here but not totally new to the hobby. Iv'e kept a 36 gallon in the past with a little bit of everything... some soft, lps and sps all did pretty decent in that setup. Currently i'm starting an entirely new tank. This is a standard 55 gal with a 20 gallon sump. Refugium in the mid section of the sump(made my own sump with 3 acrylic baffles). Fuge has 1 gallon of mineral mud and a coat of live sand. Protein skimmer also sits in the fuge section of the sump. I'll get some pictures but that's the basics of it.
Reason for my post:
I bought 40lbs of "life rock" to start up this tank with. Now this is shame on me, but i thought this was what caribsea used to offer as "live-rock". I ordered it in the past for my last setup, it was wet rock, wrapped in plastic bags with wet newspaper, in a giant styrofoam box. That's not what this was. I even contacted Caribsea to try and get some data on what this even was but going on two weeks later i haven't got a call back.
So the box shows up (absolutely massive thanks to amazon re-boxing it) and a look of real confusion comes over me as i'm opening up this rock. Completely dry rock, not even kind of live. Again my fault, i didn't look into this stuff enough to know if it was the same style of rock as before. The now obvious give-away is the term "life rock". It is a man-made rock, painted to look natural (very awesome look btw) and coated in bacteria that activates when you put it into the aquarium.
Now at this point i have no life in my tank- i figure to hell with it i'll wash it off with RO and throw it in for the cycle. Probably an okay plan but it caused some ill-effects i want to go over. Since this was a newer setup, I fired my skimmer up about a day later. Bad plan. Whatever is releasing off this rock, is completely ruining my skimmers function right now. My skimmer over-skims to the point where draining the overflow from the collection cup does not even keep up. It overflows rapidly no-matter the flow setting or water height i have the thing set at. Ooof okay. I call up Coralife because as far as i can tell this thing is busted. Iv'e never seen a skimmer overflow so badly that it couldn't be controlled with settings... and the tech agreed with me. However i hit the interweb later that night and started digging around. Randomly i came across a forum post where a gentleman had added this same rock to his established tank, and had the exact same result with a totally different skimmer. Then i found another thread. And then another where it seems like the guy never really figured it out.
ANYHOW this is my hopefully helpful post to the next guy that buys this rock, has his skimmer go ape-sh** and can't figure out why. I would definitely recommend this rock, it's beautiful, and only costs about $4/lb. I just would not throw this into an established system right away after a wash. You will end up having to shut down your skimmer for a few days/weeks and do a few water changes. Cycle it in another tank for a couple weeks doing water changes and that seems to do the trick. I'll get some pictures in the next week or so.
That's the way my cookie crumbled
Hello All! I'm actually totally new to the forum here but not totally new to the hobby. Iv'e kept a 36 gallon in the past with a little bit of everything... some soft, lps and sps all did pretty decent in that setup. Currently i'm starting an entirely new tank. This is a standard 55 gal with a 20 gallon sump. Refugium in the mid section of the sump(made my own sump with 3 acrylic baffles). Fuge has 1 gallon of mineral mud and a coat of live sand. Protein skimmer also sits in the fuge section of the sump. I'll get some pictures but that's the basics of it.
Reason for my post:
I bought 40lbs of "life rock" to start up this tank with. Now this is shame on me, but i thought this was what caribsea used to offer as "live-rock". I ordered it in the past for my last setup, it was wet rock, wrapped in plastic bags with wet newspaper, in a giant styrofoam box. That's not what this was. I even contacted Caribsea to try and get some data on what this even was but going on two weeks later i haven't got a call back.
So the box shows up (absolutely massive thanks to amazon re-boxing it) and a look of real confusion comes over me as i'm opening up this rock. Completely dry rock, not even kind of live. Again my fault, i didn't look into this stuff enough to know if it was the same style of rock as before. The now obvious give-away is the term "life rock". It is a man-made rock, painted to look natural (very awesome look btw) and coated in bacteria that activates when you put it into the aquarium.
Now at this point i have no life in my tank- i figure to hell with it i'll wash it off with RO and throw it in for the cycle. Probably an okay plan but it caused some ill-effects i want to go over. Since this was a newer setup, I fired my skimmer up about a day later. Bad plan. Whatever is releasing off this rock, is completely ruining my skimmers function right now. My skimmer over-skims to the point where draining the overflow from the collection cup does not even keep up. It overflows rapidly no-matter the flow setting or water height i have the thing set at. Ooof okay. I call up Coralife because as far as i can tell this thing is busted. Iv'e never seen a skimmer overflow so badly that it couldn't be controlled with settings... and the tech agreed with me. However i hit the interweb later that night and started digging around. Randomly i came across a forum post where a gentleman had added this same rock to his established tank, and had the exact same result with a totally different skimmer. Then i found another thread. And then another where it seems like the guy never really figured it out.
ANYHOW this is my hopefully helpful post to the next guy that buys this rock, has his skimmer go ape-sh** and can't figure out why. I would definitely recommend this rock, it's beautiful, and only costs about $4/lb. I just would not throw this into an established system right away after a wash. You will end up having to shut down your skimmer for a few days/weeks and do a few water changes. Cycle it in another tank for a couple weeks doing water changes and that seems to do the trick. I'll get some pictures in the next week or so.
That's the way my cookie crumbled
