Base Rock

[Chago09]

Carib Sea makes a baserock that is only $59 for 50lbs. Thats like 1$ per lb. I don't see why I must buy the $10 per lb live stuff when this is the exact same thing except dried, correct???

So for example if I buy a 50 lb box of base rock for my 75 gallon tank, and then add 20 lbs of live stuff just to seed it. Would or would not the base rock do the exact same job when it comes to biologically filtering the tank and growing coroline algeas etc???

Second question if I add live rock to the tank in the future, is there a way of doing it that won't cause the tank to cycle again???

Would adding base rock to the tank later cause any cycle at all???

[taillonjohn]

I'll try to help:
1. yes, base rock will become live rock after some time. your idea is good
2. depends if the rock is cured already or not. if straight from the lfs cured rock bin to your house you can just put it in the tank. If by mail, might be some die-off during shipping, so you might wanna QT first
3. no, add base rock any time

[Shooter7]

You can mix live and base rock, and eventually the base rock will become inhabited by much of the same life that is in your live rock. I started my big tank off with about 60/40% live rock to base rock. The thing that you need to remember, though, is that base rock takes time to get up to speed. If you have 100 lbs of rock with a 50/50 split, you shouldn't stock the tank as though you have 100 lbs of live rock in there, because you don't. You need to stock more slowly when using a mix of rock like that. Give the rock time to catch up.

Adding live rock to an established tank and its effects will depend on various factors. Is the new LR cured rock that is coming from one tank to your tank and being shipped in water? This would be much different to getting live rock via mail service and adding dried out live rock to your tank, where there would be a lot of die off on the rock. Yet another factor would be the size of your tank and how much LR you're adding. If you have a 120g tank with a 30g sump and 150lbs of established LR, and you add a 5lb piece of new LR, even if it's dried out a little, the tank volume and existing LR would more than likely handle the new rock being in there with not much of a bump in any of your numbers. However, you could add the same 5lb rock to a 20g tank and the results could be significantly different.

[tcilmo]

just follow what taillonjohn and Shooter7 recomended and you should be fine. Using live rock to seed base rock is a fabulous idea.