Any Rock in Fuge?

My grandparents have a farm a half mile from my house and as all farms have rock piles from the huge rocks pulled out of the fields I have a quick question. I have 50 gal. of space for my fuge and I just threw some chaeto in it. I want to add sand/rock but am not trying to spend 6 bucks a pound for rock when I have a huge stockpile out back. Would it be ok to use any rock (obviously the more porous the better...) in my fuge? Or would it be pointless? pic of fuge side of my sump included

 

tgood

IMHO - you dont need rock in your fuge - unless you had a FO tank and wanted swimming space for large fish and thus needed your primary biological filtration located externally of the main DT

you should be able to accomodate enough biological filtration capacity with the rock in your tank , saving the fuge for macros and sand bed which can assist in aspects of the biological cycle that the rock etc in the tank dont perform as efficiently (nitrate and phosphate reduction/ utilisation)

Just my opinion

Steve

 

I was thinking about starting pods in my fuge.... good/bad? I thought they would need some rock to grow and live off of. I want to get a strong pod population so I an add a mandarin. I used to have one but it died after a few months because it destroyed all the pods that I had and they weren't growing fast enough.

 

ah the Mandarin

sounds good to me for that purpose
but now we have this issue with the rock from outside?

I wouldnt use it, simply because Im paranoid about what man made nasties could have contacted the surrounding soil during its history - fields = pesticides unfortunately IMO

maybe crazy as after all, the rock I get that came from the sea, could just as easily be expossed to the same man made interference

Steve

 

+100 to that.

Pods don't really need rock. They will populate the cheato ball just fine. If I didn't have a sand bed in the fuge, then I might put a bit of rock in for them. But the sand bed has it's own benefits and a sand bed operates the best when it is clean and does not have a bunch of rock sitting on it. Keep the rock in the DT. Keep the sand and macro in the fuge. Pods will populate just fine with no help from you.

 

and to add to the rock in your fuge.....I would advise against placing it in the fuge (esp outside rock) in one of my tanks that is my predator tank I placed A TON of LR rubble in the sump to increase the filtration. Well one thing I didnt think a lot of is that the flow in a sump is way decreased and there is no livestock to clean the rocks off...so that means manual cleaning of the rocks. I was having major, major nitrate levels in that tank and one day inwall got back there and removed all that rubble. He was absolutely disgusted with the amount of junk that accumulated on those rocks.

I still believe though that 1 or 2 rocks in your sump is a good thing, but not a bunch. I also do not think that rocks from outside is good...one because you dont know what you get on them, but 2 in order to get a lot of benefit from it the rock needs to be very pourous with lots of places for bacteria growth...and most rocks I have seen around here at least is very solid with not much room for growth

 

i would not add this rock to your tank. this rock could contain minerals and ores that could have a bad reaction.

 

Thanks for the input, I was thinking along those lines and was wondering if anyone tried it before. Your opinions make sense.... I'm just going to go with about 20 lbs. of sand. I REALLY need my RO/DI unit though because I know my water quality is hurting my tank right now. Thankfully it arrived in Harrisburg tonight so I should have it Monday.

 

K+ Good call. Glad someone caught this...

 

It's absolutely true.

However, I would personally go Google up the mineral information for the deposit. There should be information on any deposits in the area, with information on all trace elements present, average percentages, etc. This would be information from the state government. It's usually information on all the major deposits in the state in one document.

I actually did this with a guy who lives in Ohio, to find out his limestone had a secondary trace of magnesium carbonate, and was relatively pure calcium carbonate compared to an average deposit.