Had to move my 300 gallon tank to change out the tile flooring. I have a second tank I use as the refuge that is 175 gallons that I’m not moving. I have about 100 lbs of live rock in the refuge and 100 in the main tank. I’m leaving the 175 in place with it filled with current water and the 100 lbs of live rock. I removed my live rock from the main tank and am letting it dry as it has a lot of crap on it I don’t want. I removed the sand and plan on putting in new sand. Not sure what all I need to do to clean my rock structure as I know a couple fish didn’t make it out of the rocks. I also am not sure how long I will need to wait once I put the new sand and rock back in before I am able to put my fish that I’m holding in a 55 gallon tank. Any help is appreciated.
Will my tank cycle again?
- Thread starter sloanhaus
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My guess would be yes you will have a cycle but not a large 1-2 month long one. I'm sure it will probably go through the uglies again with random diatoms and algae, but I'd think ammonia and nitrite would be less of a problem. Just take it on the slow side in any case
sloanhaus
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I’m thinking about drying all the rock out and starting over. The rock I have in the tank has that really hard white worm looking things everywhere on it. Unless you know a way to get rid of all that crap.
Brett S
Valuable Member
If you dry the rock then you will definitely go through another cycle as the tank processes all that die off. One way to avoid this would be to slowly add the rock back in. If you keep the 175 up with it’s live rock, then it could definitely handle the addition of a few pieces of dry rock a week without recycling your tank. You will just want to go slowly and keep an eye on the ammonia levels as you do. If you start seeing ammonia then you’ll need to add the rock more slowly.
That said, if you have stuff that you don’t like on the rock in your 300 and the 175 is part of that same system, then that rock will also have the bad things... and as soon as you add the rock back to the 300 the bad stuff will repopulate. So letting it dry like that will probably be futile unless you take out all the rock from the system and possibly the sand as well, depending on what it is that you don’t like on the rock.
That said, if you have stuff that you don’t like on the rock in your 300 and the 175 is part of that same system, then that rock will also have the bad things... and as soon as you add the rock back to the 300 the bad stuff will repopulate. So letting it dry like that will probably be futile unless you take out all the rock from the system and possibly the sand as well, depending on what it is that you don’t like on the rock.
