I bought a piece of driftwood off ebay; it hasn't arrived yet though (i just got it yesterday) And I want to boil it to get rid of a lot of the tannins. But the piece is a lot bigger than any pot I have. Should I should hold part of it in for a few minutes, and then turn it around? And how long do you boil for?
Boiling Driftwood
- Thread starter FSM
- Start date
Just use the bath and fill it with scalding hot water, and if you really want to nuke it wash and scrub it heavily with bleach before putting it in the bath. Boiling is an effective way of hurrying the release of tannins as well as rushing the sinking process but to do this properly you'll need to boil it for hours anyway.
Best way to treat it, in my opinion, is to wash with a bleach solution, rinse heavily while scrubbing with a clean brush of some sort, then use a pressurized hose/gurney to nuke anything that's possibly left and give it a REALLY thorough wash down, then whack it in a spare tank/tub for a week. Stick it in scalding hot water when you want to introduce it to your tank, and either wait for the water to cool or empty after 30 minutes or whatever and rinse with cold water.
That's probably overkilled and I'm sure a quick scald and wash under flowing water with a brush would suffice but you never can be too careful.
Best way to treat it, in my opinion, is to wash with a bleach solution, rinse heavily while scrubbing with a clean brush of some sort, then use a pressurized hose/gurney to nuke anything that's possibly left and give it a REALLY thorough wash down, then whack it in a spare tank/tub for a week. Stick it in scalding hot water when you want to introduce it to your tank, and either wait for the water to cool or empty after 30 minutes or whatever and rinse with cold water.
That's probably overkilled and I'm sure a quick scald and wash under flowing water with a brush would suffice but you never can be too careful.
No need, it won't do any good. Scalding water will kill off the baddies but you'll have to deal with tannins and I believe Malaysian Driftwood is notorious for that.
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I whole-heartedly recommend Seachem Purigen, once you've used it you won't look back.
You could try one of those large plastic tubs at Home Depot, Lows, Target etc..Just boil water on your largest pots and dump them on the tub. Rinse/reapeat until most of the tannins are out. You can also use the tub for acclimating fish.
Okay so the driftwood arrived on wednesday. I put it in a 10 gallon cooler and filled that with water that was as hot as it gets out of the bathtub faucet. I'm not sure how hot that is, but its definitely hot enough to hurt bad, and steam a lot. I'm also going to scrub it off with a wire brush. Do I need to do anything to sterilize it? Anything that lives in water would have died when it was all dried out, correct?
I currently have a big piece of Malaysian driftwood sitting in a plastic tub in my back yard. I really don't think that you have to use hot water and I really don't think that you have to worry about killing parasites. If you bought it from Rock Art Source, the exterior has already been cleaned and you don't have to scour it. Give it a couple of water changes over maybe a week or two and you'll remove most of the tannins.