I know you are supposed to cure this stuff for like 3-6 months to get the PH to stabalize. Was just curious, the way I've read to do it is soak in water, rinse and repeat. How would adding a PH neutralizer affect this curing process? Anybody tried it? Just curious, I aquired a lot of freshwater stuff and one of the things is a PH neutralizer that adjusts the water to 7.0. Wanting to get some kind of use out of it, but its obviously not useful for a reef tank.
What is the rock made of? I would be leery of adding a pH buffer to the water if I wanted the rock to stabilize. You are waiting for things to leech out of the rock and buffering the pH may slow that process down. The big answer is that the pH neutral shouldn't have much affect on the chemistry of the rock itself, so I doubt you would see any benefit anyway. Plus it would make it really hard to tell when the rock quit affecting the pH because you have a buffer there to counteract that. So it will always read 7 and you think the rock is done when in reality it is still acidifying the water and the buffer is just correcting the water.
I agree with pb. Adding a ph neutralizer would just slow the process of actually curing the rock down. At least that makes sense to me. My experience with frag disks and home made rock is as mentioned earlier the rinse and repeat method. I use a cooler that has the little spiggot where you can let the water off and when it's empty fill it up again and repeat pretty much daily until the water after a 24 hour period of sitting tests ph neutral.
thats what i figured, there really aren't any shortcuts in this hobby huh? lol well, while we are on the subject, would a commercial ready mix work for the man made base rock? Fixin to be pouring a slab for the real fish room and prolly gonna have about a yard and a half more than I need ( project takes 3.5 yds and the min for delivery is 5 ). Wanna do something with it other than use it for a drainage ditch...
Usually we try to use some type of calcium based aggregate in the mix. We use a white portland cement as well. That is how we end up with pearly white frag tiles! The pea gravel and silica sand they put in regular concrete will not hurt your tank or it's critters, but it definitely won't do anything for it aesthetically. As far as curing the homemade rock, it just takes time for the neutral pH fresh water to soak in deep and the high pH compounds to dilute out into the water. Those compounds are so concentrated that it just takes a long time to draw them out.
