Cleaning live rock

[Tpl4life]

Just a general question and looking for anyone with different results. I want to clean my live rock in my tank. I have a bin and want to know if I can take out all my live rock, clean/scrub it in a bin of saltwater (free of this hairy algae) and then put it back into my main tank in the same day. It doesn't seem like it should do anything detrimental, just checking here first to make sure since I can't find any specific article about it yet. Thanks for any input at all!

[CJ858]

I am curious about this too. Sounds harmless but im new here and rather not give advice. Will be moving all my rock from a 20g to a 50g soon and also add a bit more. All at one time of course) Maybe run a heater at least in the bin with oxygen circulating?

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[Kris]

LIve rock is at least part of the bio-filter in your current set-up. If you take it all out (scrub or not) you will impact your systems biological filtration.

If you have hair algae,you have a high nutrient load, and often that means a sand bed or other filtering material(s) that may be saturated with detritus, ie nutrients. Scrubbing the rock generally does little to solve your hair algae problem if you do not also address nutrients. (Again, this is all a guess, you did not say what else you have in the tank, sand, fish, coral, inverts, etc? that can impact your hair algae growth.)

There a books and articles on line for addressing hair algae, I don't want to write one here is one, (there are millions) :http://reefcentral.com/forums/blog.php?b=505

[crabbysd]

IMO. yes you can do it. I have several times. I have used either old tank water or new scripps water(on a full rebuild). I did add peroxide to the wash water and scrubbed the heck out of it and put it back in with corals.
On the big rehab some of the acros were not fond of it and I did get a low PH oddity(just used an air pump to cure it) but the nem fish zoas etc were fine. the last time I did it a few weeks ago it was a less aggressive treatment and I just scrubbed the big rocks in tank water and dropped them back in.

yes there is a small difference in bio filter for a time so keep an eye, and you should use prime or bacteria to help out the bio filter. but Its like an out patient treatment. feed a little less, stay on the meds(bacteria) but it workes for me.

I will say one thing that helped IMMENSELY the last few times was a cheap canister filter. a layer of blue white floss in each basket and a bag of carbon and a bag of gfo. no media.
I hooked it up to the tank in 5 min and started pulling rocks. it clears the water in an hour.
Its the nasty "dust" that will really impact the system(harshly sometimes) so the Can pulls it out really quickly into the floss, the carbon/gfo bind the really really nasty stuff and keep it out of the tank. I use it now when I scape and clean the sump in the big tank too and usually let it run for a few days after, then clean it and put back in the garage. $60 on amazon. got mine used here for 40.

FWIW, my big rebuilt transfer for the 29jbj to the new 30g cube took a full day, used heaters and powerheads bins etc, the last big giant deep clean scrub took just over two hours.