so you want to do an aquascape and you want to use dragon stone rocks but you just don't know
what you have to do before using them in your aquascape or how to use them in your aquascape
well you're at the right place because in this video i will be explaining how to prepare dragon
stone rocks to put them in your aquarium hello and welcome to dolbec aqua designs
dragonstone rocks are really popular in the aquarium hobby and with good reason they're full
of different colors different shapes different textures which really complement a aquascape
there's also a great advantage with these rocks is that you can break them down with a hammer and
create smaller pieces to add more variety to your aquascape unfortunately their biggest advantage
being that you can break them down easily is also one of the biggest disadvantages in fact
when you're buying a dragon stone rock you're mostly buying a pile of mud that is surrounded
with some rock these rocks are really dusty really dirty and you have to prepare them before putting
them into your aquascape otherwise you're gonna make a huge mess as i'm talking right now there's
lots of pieces of dirt that are dropping from the rock because this rock was not prepared
and so what i'll be doing today is that i'll be preparing this new rock that i just bought at my
local fish store and showing you guys how you can prepare these rocks to use them in your aquascapes
so let's go so here you can see an unprepared piece of dragonstone rock that comes straight
from my fish store as you can see there's lots of mud right on the rock right here all this stuff
and it comes up super easy and you got to be careful because if you don't wash
your rocks all of this mud that you see everywhere here it's just gonna cloud up your water and so
the easiest way that i found to clean up my rocks just to take it and put them in a bucket
and then this bucket i will fill it up with water
you might see a few bubbles get out of the rocks like we see right now
this is totally normal the dragon stone rocks are really porous rocks that are filled with
either mud or air and as you put them in water the air will slowly come out so don't worry
so you don't need to fill the bucket all the way up what we want to do is we want to let the rocks
in the water in the bucket so that the mud will soften up and will be easier to take off
one thing that you should note is that you don't want to put this stuff
in your regular bathtub because as you can see the water is already all brown and
this brown water will most likely stain your white bath so be careful and use the bucket
after a whole day you can see that a lot of mud is already coming off the rocks and the water is all
cloudy with the sediments the thing that i'll be doing off camera because it's easier is to drain
all of the water and rinse the rocks again and let them sit for another day
we are the next day and as you can see the water is super clear because now we've rinsed off most
of the sediments and as you can see there are now more clean there's still gonna be some mud
on them but at the same time we cannot rinse them forever also as you can see we've got two
rocks that are dark red and two rocks that are pale yellow so this is also something that you
must consider when you're buying some dragon stone rocks is that once you wash them and once they're
a bit wet they might not be the same color and so if you want rocks of the same color to do a setup
that blends in you got to be more careful when you buy your rocks if you don't really care about the
matchup well it doesn't matter that much so what will happen is that i will take these two rocks
together to make an aquarium and i'll so take these two rocks and make a separate aquascape
and so there you have it this is how you prepare dragon stone rocks to put them in your aquascapes
thank you for watching and i'll see you in the next one