# Baking Driftwood



## AheartlessFish (Mar 18, 2008)

I had a huge problem with black beard algae and green algae on my driftwood in my planted tank.
I decided to nuke the driftwood until i get my algae issue resolved.
I baked the driftwood pieces in the oven at 300 degrees F for 1-2 hours.
It seemed to take care of all of the algae. (theres still green coloring on the wood from the green algae but it shouldnt bother me much)

The smell of the wood was awkward and i didnt want the smell lingering in the house.
i couldnt leave the driftwood outside of the house because its raining and i dont trust bugs getting into it. 

I have an empty 180 gallon tank thats cycling with nothing inside of it.
i instantly placed the pieces of wood into the empty 180 gallon tank (still warm)


The only question i have is that will this do anything to the tank's water quality?


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## AheartlessFish (Mar 18, 2008)

So today i performed a water test...everything seemed to be in order...the water got cloudy a bit...tested for phosphates and found that it was over 10 ppms...weird how heated wood would increase phosphates.


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## Afyounie (Aug 10, 2007)

What kind of wood was it that you baked? I used to collect driftwood from rivers in FL, most likely cypress driftwood, and while it looked nice, it was soft and continued to rot in the tank at a fairly consistent rate. I wonder now if I should have baked it, because just air drying it did nothing to harden the wood and the wood still had massive amounts of black beard algae covering it. I'd also like to know if the wood hardened up from baking it.


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## AheartlessFish (Mar 18, 2008)

majority of malasian drift wood i believe...its heavy and sinks...doesnt float

as for the black beard the majority got nuked but theres still bits of it left on the wood after drying up not as much as the original ammount tho


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