fact: I have cycled my own reefs with a pile of those rocks above, I have never owned a reefing test for ammonia, nitrite or nitrate ever. not ever. I have never waited 30 days for dry rocks to cycle, have only used skip cycle insta reef rocks that macna conventions use.
-have cycled about ten thousand tanks online exactly by inserting myself uninvited into the thread and testing predictions and not one has failed, live rock is this consistent. dry rock is that consistent if we went there, nobody's initial fish have died using updated cycling rules.
-in cycling threads if a new reefer posts free ammonia everyone believes him or her. if the exact same readings from the exact same test are applied to the tank post cycle, well after cycle closes as in months or a year later, then everyone chimes in that api is notoriously wrong we can see it in hundreds of posts. The tests are the same, the context changes to the crowd and that makes troubleshooting hard, its dependent on context and not actually on what bacteria do.
but visual cycling depends on things we can see. and smell. if you had any dangerous ammonia you'd smell it for sure, and the tank would be cloudy, and nothing opened, and opposite of your pics.
now we are free to totally clean out any misbehaving system and never have the uglies, that's the benefit.
you can lift those rocks out and set them on your counter for 30 minutes every time you want, and nothing happens. they do not uncycle, they stay cycled.
(the crowd thinks im lying he he)
ok then, here's a fifteen year old pico reef being drained for 33 mins. that's live rock, corals and a shrimp holed up in there somewhere and then what the system looks like 12 hours later:
next morning after my corals and rock were as cold as jerky during the drain. appeared dry (corals get drained in the wild, they're adapted)
