help a newbie with live rock please?

[harmonic]

A friend has given me about 100lbs of live rock, only it's not live anymore. The rock has been piled in a corner of her deck for nearly a year, and looks and smells awfull. How should I go about cleaning and re-constituting this stuff? It will probably be quicker than it would for me to save up enough $$$ to buy new ones. (about 3 months it looks like)

thanks, Rob.

[KevinM]

There is nothing wrong with that rock.
I'd lay it all out and take the garden hose to it, with a good strong sprayer on the end, and hose it all off good. Get all the loose matter off that you can.
Then, nothing left to do but put it in a tank with saltwater, lights, heater, good circulation, and a skimmer, and wait. During this initial period, you may also want to begin getting pieces of good LR from an LFS, or maybe even order a box, to help seed the old rock.

Lucky you!

Kev

[Alberio]

Yeah, you have a nice find there. It's called live rock because of the bacteria, little critters and coraline algae that live on/in the rock. So if you throw the dead-live rock in the tank and add a bit (say 1/4 of what is dead) of live-live rock guess what happens. The critters in the live-live rock multiply and look for someplace to live. Viola! six months later you have all LIVE rock.

There are some caveats however, live good lighting and water quality.

Learn about cycling too. If there is some dead matter in that rock you're getting, you don't want to toss it in with a bunch of fish right away.

Mike

[MrSandman]

I'd be a little bit careful putting this stuff in your tank. Make sure that your source knows exactly what this rock has been through. Being that it has been stored outside means that it could have been exposed to any pesticides, chemicals, fertilizers, pollutants and simple run-off from the rain. Hopefully someone else here has experience with this and can provide you some info on pre-conditioning it correctly.

[Mike_Noren]

Originally posted by harmonic
A friend has given me about 100lbs of live rock, only it's not live anymore.

Dr Shimek has just posted a short recommendation how to treat dead live rock to render it harmless. Basically you first rinse it in muriatic acid, then in bleach, then VERY THOROUGHLY in fresh water. It's still dead, of course, and will need several months in a reef tank or similar to become 'live'.

[K. Lee]

Originally posted by Mike_Noren
Dr Shimek has just posted a short recommendation how to treat dead live rock to render it harmless. Basically you first rinse it in muriatic acid, then in bleach, then VERY THOROUGHLY in fresh water. It's still dead, of course, and will need several months in a reef tank or similar to become 'live'.

You missed an important precaution, which Dr. Shimek makes very clear: Rinse the rock several times in water between the acid, and the bleach.

The thread is here. http://archive.reefcentral.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=164524 FWIW, the outlined process will kill everything in the tank, and rock, AFAIK. AND, because of the proceedure and chemicals involved should be done very cautiously, and by following the advice.

FWIW, I can't vouge for this method, but it makes some sense. Lowering the pH with the acid should help many metals to disassociate from liverock, or other solids, and the bleach will I assume destroy more organics. Just remember the water after the acid, and ALSO after the bleach. Personally, I don't believe I would ever do something so harsh to my tank.

[harmonic]

Thanks everyone. I happen to have some muriatic acid, we use it to clean up mortar stains on our stonework. I'm leaning towards trying this (in a closed container outside) because these rock could have been exposed to pesticides. (and any chemical pollution present in the rain water)

It'd be a shame to let 100lbs of live rock go to waste.

Thanks again, Rob