Tip of the Day – 7/4/2012

While the use of dry live rock, otherwise known as dead rock, may benefit your aquarium due to the lack of potentially nasty hitch hikers and undesirable algae, it also has a couple of major drawbacks. The most glaring of these is the complete lack of life obviously, but a lesser known fact is this type of rock is loaded down with phosphate. Most people don’t know this and get the rock thinking they’ve dogded a major bullet, but only find problems later with excessive algae growth and other unexplainable issues. For many dry rock users, the solution to this problem has been to soak the rocks in RO/DI water for several weeks or even months prior to putting it in an aquarium. That water is changed out regularly, and this regimen has been proven to be somewhat successful in most cases. It’s not a perfect solution, but it will at least make the phosphate problem more manageable.