The Official All About Dry Rock Thread.

[Aquaph8]

Please share your experiences with dry rock and if you think its better than starting a tank live rock. How long did it take it to show some life? Any algae issues? Did you seed it at all? Where did you purchase your rock? Any other info that may be important? If your tank was started using only dry rock please post some progression shots for us. Thanks

 

[Reef Breeders Verified Sponsor]

I started with very little lr, then purchased 50 lbs of dry rick to fill my old 45. I now have the same rock in my current 125, and it is doing well. I would highly reccomend seeding it with live rock, as coraline will take a while to fill in otherwise.

 

[btkrausen]

I started completely with dry rock, and then seeded with about 40lbs from Premium Aquatics. To be honest, I never saw much life on the rocks, and have had green cyano growing like made, even with short light period, less feeding, and a small bioload compared to tank size.

I'm actually purchasing new, live rock this weekend to completely replace the dead, dry rock.

 

[Zeither18]

I never had much problem with my dry rock from brs. It took me about 3 weeks to cycle it. I scrubbed it, acid washed it,soaked it with ro/di water and used a bottle of colony and 30 lbs of live rock to start the cycle process. Ran a protien skimmer and powerheads with frequent water changes(2 to 3 a week) and dropped it in the tank. It was a lot of work that may or may not have been overkill but I didn't want to take any chances as brs pukani is well known to leach phosphates. It has been in the tank a month now and starting to show some color

 

[mallorieGgator]

I am using dry rock with some live rock. I have some hair algae, green and red cyano, and diatoms quite often. Just changed the RO/DI and I run biopellets. However, the tank is still only 8 mos old but by now you would think that I would not be having those issues.

 

[Aquaph8]

bump

 

[blkhawk10]

I started my tank off with only lr, but ended up adding some dry rock later on cause I wanted more rock...I have since got rid of some rock for a new look and you can't tell what used to be dry rock cause all of it is alive. I'd say it took a little while to see some coraline algae growth on the dry rock and even longer than that for all the microorganisms to make it home.

 

[cdness]

I have lots of progression pics, but none that hit the very recent. I'll post some below. This was started with 100% dry rock from BRS.

Ok, this may get big, but here it goes:

7-2008 (post initial cycle):

9-2008:

11-2008:

3-2009:

4-2009:

5-2009:

1-2010 (I think I had either bad RODI filters or a bad bucket of salt. Algae outbreak was very quick to come on and just as quick to leave):

3-2011:

4-2012 (This is after the move to the 125G from the 75G):

 

[luke33]

I think dry rock is a great thing, but i have noticed an extremely large amt of phos leaching from it, and i've used a few diff kinds. So if you cycle it well you'r good, but dont think you can just drop 20lbs to an existing tank as it would do bad things.

 

[cdness]

20 lbs of dry rock is LOTS of rock... I wouldn't recommend adding that much "live" rock to an existing tank either without making sure it is cycled or cured first. There is die off in the rock in shipping which can be just as bad, if not worse, than the dry rock. I never had issues with it leaching phosphates when I used it either. It all cycled very well, but it did take a good amount of time to get cycled.

When doing my upgrade to my 125G tank I was adding about 5 pounds of dry rock (which is close to the volume of a 7 - 10 pound wet live rock) to my sump every week until the sump was basically full so I'd have what I needed cycled over the course of a month. I never had detectable levels of phosphate and didn't have any sort of cycle or algae outbreak whatsoever. This was all BRS Reef-Saver, shelf, and pukani rock.