Question on Live Rock

Bob Escher · Mar 9, 2016

I'm doing a water change, mixed my salt two days ago and left it mixing, I pulled about three gallons from my tank and saw that I had some live rock out of the water.
I went and double checked the water I was mixing and saw I screwed up and didn't have enough sLt in it ( 1.018) I threw more salt in it and it came out fine but it's still mixing
1. How long can I leave live rock out of the water.
And can I put the newly mixed water back into the tank ( even though some of it is not up to salinity )
Thanks

143MPCo · Mar 9, 2016

You don't want to take them out and let them totally dry out for hours at a time, but as long as you keep them damp, the life on them should be fine. (That's why suppliers are able to ship most live rock damp, or wrapped in wet cloth, rather than in water.)

CodyRVA · Mar 9, 2016

On another note, while most do recommend letting your newly mixed salt water rest, resting for days isn't necessary. When you mix your salt, the salinity is going to come into balance soon after thoroughly mixing it. Unless you have evaporation, which I suggest you store your water in a bucket with a lid, your salinity will not change, so theres no need to let it sit for a few days. I usually mix my water up a few hours prior to water changes, mainly to bring it up to temp. (maybe 5 hours max). In turn, you wouldn't have to wait to submerge your live rock with more water and you'd avoid the issue of losing beneficial bacteria within your live rock.

brandon429 · Mar 9, 2016

just today during a rip down tank cleaning, I had my lr and all corals in the air for half an hour, done this 200 x so far approx. used to it, and the lr has plenty of sponges and pods too, they just recoil in fear during the process then come back out next day from the holes of the rock. I do squirt the corals a little w water while cleaning just to be nice, but even if I didn't they'd be fine too cuz that's happened before. 30 mins is my record, I usually put them back in within 15-20

when I clean I don't play.

my whole sandbed was rinsed with tap for 10 mins until it was so clean it looked new, then the final rinse was with saltwater to evacuate that tap out from in between the grains. none of this recycles a reef tank, only leftover detritus recycles a reef tank and I blasted all of that out. the sand still has plenty of bacteria, since tap cannot sterilize anything and my total tap dwell time was very short anyway.

99% of reefkeepers partially clean the sandbed, leaving some waste in. they deal w cyano and diatoms and a bit of algae usually as needed, and the sand compiles waste faster than its being removed, compounding the invader issues im seeing as a trend over the years.
1% leave no waste, break all the rules, and the tank lives ten years w no algae or cyano issues due to no waste retention, neat comparison. if I had a large tank I couldn't rip apart like this, id be on the storage continuum too lol thank goodness for easy pico reefs.

Bob Escher · Mar 9, 2016

As soon as I wrote this I said to myself Dummy. You take it from your LFS wrapped in newspaper in a plastic drive and drive 45 minutes. Well I ended up putting the rock in the waste water and waited a while. I didn't clean the sand bed as well as I wanted but that's ok I think I'm at the end of the cycle with no ammonia or nitrites and nitrates at .2 ppm this tank has been cycling for 3 months of course I have fooled around with it probably causing it to recycle but if it all goes belly up I've got Dr Tim and his ammonia and bacteria coming in . I'm also trying to cycle dry rock in a bucket. So hopefully by the time my big tank ( 65 gal, big to me anyway) arrives it will all be ready
Thank you guys for putting up my rants and questions

brandon429 · Mar 9, 2016

Bob I have to ask, did you bring home white barren live rock to expose to ammonia, or was it full live rock with coralline, where we never expose it to ammonia>? pics

Bob Escher · Mar 9, 2016

I have both and no the dry rock is dry and I have not put any ammonia in it as yet I did put a piece of live rock in with the dry rock but I HAVE not put in ammonia into it. ( I haven't received it yet. But thank you for the warning. I won't do it
But if ammonia was put in with live rock with that kill everything off and recure it?

Thank you

brandon429 · Mar 9, 2016

http://reef2reef.com/threads/new-ta...d-cocktail-shrimp-live-rock-no-shrimp.214618/

that'll cover ya for sure. it distills down to this

leaving the ammonia unadded adds to the time the dry rock portion takes to seed and become a filter, a place for coralline etc. but leaving the ammonia unadded should be considered when using any live rock portion, because you paid more money for that type and burning it with ammonia isn't helping.

the dry portion will take on the living forms from the live portion in time, but slower since you aren't spiking ammonia.

adding bottle bac would speed things a bit and and wouldn't hurt in fact ill go back and edit a sentence for that, it would speed up your efforts to add the bottle bac portion of dr tims, but not the ammonia portion. if you are buying hq live cured rock I wouldn't do the ammonia portion of the common cycle, that thread details how to choose when ammonia is used and when not, and it also gives the start time for most cycles.

Bob Escher · Mar 9, 2016

Ok I read it and understand why
Here's a picture of the tank as of last Thursday by the way. Remember it's only a ten gallon which will become my QT tank. Yes I plan on keeping sand and maybe the HOB and live rock as well ( some not all maybe 2 lbs)
There is approx 6 Lbs in there now the purple rock is from one LFS that said it was straight live rock but I found out it was "painted that way" so I don't know for sure if it was truly live rock. Didn't find anything on it but the rest is live
Thanks oh the probes are in there just to keep them wet from my apex. When I first got them I didn't know better and threw the caps away

brandon429 · Mar 9, 2016

just the one chunk of verified lr would run most average starting bioloads, and if the sand was wet pack it will come w bacteria too (there was a link in that thread about scientific studies of bottle bac...bagged bac is the same)

nice pics and that's a ton of active surface area for a ten gallon, you aren't going to be packing nine tangs in there, so this system really doesn't need to cycle much at all and it certainly doesn't require free ammonia, perhaps a shot of bottle bac.

or three shots lol

but to wait 4 months for the white rock to catch up is just adding active surface area far beyond what you'll ever need to be zero ammonia, that's why I was thinking its pretty much ready. one way to move past the painted portion to dig for truth is to look for pods worms snails fanworms bristleworms anything living. if there are none, run a 2ppm digestion test if you like or don't, just begin lightly reefing after a nice water change. if those animals can be seen, it means you added some real cured stuff and it is a powerful ammonia scrubber, enough for the whole tank of a low bioload.

Bob Escher · Mar 9, 2016

Oh no most of this rock will go ( plus the other dry rock I have plus probably 30 or 40 more lbs) will go into my 65 gal when I get it. I'm waiting on benefit to come through. Should have kept my 37 gal with the 5 gal CPR HOB refugium. But I wanted to get started earlier with the rock.

I have the Red Sea marine care test kit which shows a ppm of 2 for nitrates and then I bought a NCO's test kit for nitrate which shows between 12 and 25 pm which one is more accurate

brandon429 · Mar 9, 2016

not sure on the testing, I literally do not test in reefkeeping except for salinity and temp as nothing else is required *when* you have a system that permits large water changes. when you have to conserve water changes due to mass gallonage, individual param control is important. if I had large tanks id own a few.

that is the range among our nonscientific kits.

test tube graduation marks vary, dosing procedures vary, titration habits vary it all adds up to the ranges you see and then actual test kit physics could be at fault, who knows. api ammonia certainly has physical challenges.
your question highlights something that I think is shocking though. what if your highest end kit turns out to be right, but lets say you had a bit less nutrient so that it read 8 ppm accurately....what would that red sea read then, 0?

so that means ten thousand people who either own those lot [HASHTAG]#kits[/HASHTAG], or are running the method w similar variables, might read zero nitrates and indeed there could be 8 ppm, see how profound that hidden detail is?

causes cycling hysteria. why did my cycle stop? threads.

cycles do not ever stop

and to test nitrate and nitrite isn't harmful, but its not required either for cycling (for nutrient control detailing its fine) and to test them in cycling adds two more steps unneeded, and two more misreads to make you doubt the cycle process. only ammonia is required.

nitrate is always being made when ammonia goes from some to zero within 24 hours in a biosystem, whether we see that nitrate or not on a test doesn't matter, our testers aren't awesome they barely get us by, yet we base them as foolproof and make thousand dollar decisions off them. I will now link your thread to that cycling thread for showing us the nitrate ranges of two common and massively popular kits

only ammonia from a reliable kit needs to be traced out to cycle a tank, neat info. a way to carve off the insanity into something universally repeatable.

Bob Escher · Mar 9, 2016

Yes I see your point but what goes through a persons mind when they lose fish, or inverts and corals start bleaching out? What's the first thing most of us do? Start testing, water changes ask questions on Forums, and on and on. Three weeks ago I bought 3 or 4 hermit crabs, 3 nacissarius snail, after checking parameters they all died within 2 days ( opened my mouth too soon on this forum) tested to my surprise everything was good except nitrates which were at a acceptable 20Ppm , did a water change 50% and still nitrates were up. No one could figure out why they died they should have thrived. So I guess we all do it just to make sure our pets are safe, I guess it's nature until your comfortable with what you got ( until it crashes LOL

brandon429 · Mar 9, 2016

and we had no way to link their loss to nitrates or any other param provided ammonia was true zero, tracing out those losses might be tricky but I wouldn't even implicate mr nitrate

brandon429 · Mar 9, 2016

one of the neatest ways to conceptualize a cycle is that you are giving your reef tank a set of kidneys

our tanks with group A barren rock have no way to process proteins and nitrogenous waste, yet everything we do in reefing is protein based as a requisite. we are giving them a system to allocate byproducts of protein degradation, the resulting ammonia, vs the toxicity buildup someone in renal shock may go through because of inability to deal with their own proteins and protein metabolism byproducts.

nitrate and nitrite aren't burning cells, ammonia sure is