I have always tried to keep the rocks far from the glass to be able to clean the tank, but then i thought, if the algae were to grow where no one was looking, wouldn’t that be a plus… so is it a good idea to piled the rock up like a wall in the back of a tank… That way more swimming room in the front?
Behind the wall will be a slow flow area where food will settle down to the bottom and decompose. As soon as live rock was introduced the rock wall has been a problem in the hobby. Many hobbyist have gone to great lengths to keep the rock away from the walls and some have even tried to keep it off the ground.
Ideally we would all have massive remote filtration systems with the majority of our rock in a high flow tank hidden out of sight. Then we could use rock only for appearance sake. Most of us just don’t have massive amounts of extra room. Some might say they don’t have the $. I would argue though that vats to hold water can be bought for a lot less money then the cheapest skimmers.
what i did was built a pvc rack to hold the rocks, my original idea was to have the front columns half the height of the back ones so from the side it would be a sort of maze of towers that you could watch fish swim between, but as i started to drill the live rock i shattered too many of the rocks for the front rows so i took the smaller rocks and sort of stacked them on the front so i had horizontal places to stick frags.
point is it managed to make the rock wall look and yet i have about an inch to two inches in places behind the wall where there is plenty of flow and the fish can swim and they feel safer…
the rack
side shot of the space behind for flow (older pic)
most current pic
that looks prettycooll… im def doing dIY rock and making some sick shelves and i think i will use pvc to stack it all
for what its worth i did not cement the uprights so i can remove them easily, keep that in mind
im going to make the rocks individually… and put a pipe throught them during the hardening process… that way they are predrilled and i can just slide on after curing
want to see pics asap
havent done it yet i plan to do it around xmas, 1 so i can build peices for my nano i will be taking toschool, and 2 so i can have them ready for when i set up my tank afters school
DIY rock isn’t cheap in my opinion. Look into the curing process. Also some people have had trouble with making LR before and it falling apart, so you might not get it the first time and if you calc all the hours of labor(making and curing)… In my opinion not worth it, but if you have some really good ideas and no other way to do them…
Our former president Al did a really good article on DIYS rock. It was posted on the DRC site… somewhere.
okay, ill look into it…
the curing process is a lot i know that… and very labour intensive, but i can control it and get the peices how i want them
That looks pretty cool!