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LOCAL CUSTOMERS BUYING ROCK We do sell uncured rock locally, but at the cured price if you pick it out. If you want us to prebox up the rock and have ready for you at the door, we can often sell uncured this way, or if driving from out of town, you can make arrangements to get uncured prices.
Rock Types and Prices below
What makes our live rock special?
If you go surfing the web, you'll find hundreds of places online selling you live rock. All making claims that theres is the best rock. We have even seen places claim the rock is sprayed with a mist of saltwater in fiji to precure it. It's amazing what people will say to sell there rock.
So how can you weed out what is good and what is not. The only way is to know the company you are buying from and how they buy. There are many distributors of live rock, these buy thousands a pound at a time, import to LA airport and warehouse the rock in boxes. All live rock will sit in these boxes until sold and the key is knowing your distributor to make sure your rock is not one of them. There are places selling rock that is 2 plus weeks old. Ever seen those Super 44 pound rock sales? That's where they come from, people needing to get rid of there old rock in boxes fast.
What we do. We work closely with the distributors to get the rock to us as fast as possible. We have a handler in LAX that goes out and reloads the rock at the airport and transfer to our airport so it's not warehoused. Our average time from Pacific Island Rock to our shop is 48 hours or less.
All live rock that we sell goes straight from our airport to our large live rock pools. At this time we have 3 - 600 gallon pools with a 150 gallon common sump. We have 400watt halide lighting over each pool. We have calcium reactor and a huge, i mean huge MTC 3000 HSA skimmer to keep ammonia and nitrates down during curing. Then each pool has a minimum of 5000 gph of water flow circulating, plus our main 5000gph return pump to make all 3 pools share the common water so we can transfer rock from pool to pool with zero stress on the lifeforms. We can't get out and see all of our competitors shops, but we believe ours is one of the finest ways to cure liverock. You just can't do this kind of business selling rock out of a 200 gallon tank. The more water volume, more water current and more skimming the better the rock will turn out.
How is our rock sold?
We sell our rock with no minimum. If you want 1 pound of rock no problem, 7 pounds, 59 pounds, what ever you want. Watch shipping cost though, sometimes it's just not economical to get a few pounds. We hand pick all of the rock, uncured or fully cured. Tell us what you want and we'll try and pick exactly what you are looking for. On average, we'll have around 1000 pounds of each variety instock to choose from.
Net Weight vs. Gross Weight This is where the consumer gets ripped off the most. You buy a 44 pound of that special price rock for a great price. You unpack it and find you have about 30 plus pounds of rock, bunch of rubble and wet box that makes up the rest. That is called gross weight, we are very familar with this technique because it's how wholesalers sell us the rock. We have no choice but to buy at this method, but you do and we do not pass along this unfair way to sell. We sell NET weight. If you order 40 pounds, you get 40 pounds of rock. Then we put it in a box and ship it on it's way. We put zero rubble in the box. Now you might get rubble from shipping, but we guarantee it's not put in there before shipping.
Shipping Live Rock
If affordable, we recommend shipping rock overnight, but when the weather is fair 50-75 degree, 2-day shipping does quite well. We can use Fedex, UPS or airport to airport if you have Southwest Airlines available. If you are close enough, we can use ground UPS.
That is pretty much the story on live rock. We only buy the top grade live rocks, we only work with the best distributors and we put all rock in the water. We are very honest about our rock. Quality on rock varies quite a bit from week to week, except Marshall is almost always really nice. Email or call and ask us how the rock looks, we'll tell you. Especially on Fiji, since it's quality has really gone down in the last 14 months.
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