Clean Sand: Is it sustainable and how much care does it take?

[Squart]

Its part and parcel having to clean the sand. Just need to get into it. The reward after is nice clean sand. I like the idea of pumping water back up when cleaning. If you have the Right equipment it gets done. Im very new to salt water and i enjoy reading the comments.

 

[Calm Blue Ocean]

Since I'm still new to this, I'm really not sure. The sand in my current system is very fine. Trying to vacuum it means lots of sand in the bucket. In the year that the tank has been running I've lost at least an inch of my 2 inches of sand and I'm down to the glass in the pistol shrimp cave, clownfish corner, and goby corner. Today was yet another week where the bottom of my bucket was covered in fine sand. Every round of cyano, diatoms, and goodness knows what that crap is, means more lost sand. Sure feels like a battle I can't win!

In my new tank I went with the larger Special Grade sand. It's still too new for me to have had a chance to test its cleanability but I'm sure hoping it's better. Stuff grows on sand, sand needs to be cleaned. I did pick up an Eheim Quick Vac Pro for the new tank. It would never work with the old fine sand (I imagine it would clog instantly) but hopefully it makes cleaning the new sand easier.

 

[RajV]

90G tank . A bit over 2 years . The sand sifting goby plays a key role . I use 2 maxspect gyres . A while back i realized my goby wasn't doing its job , only to realize it kinda vanished into thin air. I had to buy another goby and within a week my sand was shining like silver . I Don't clean the sand during a water change. About a month later I found my lost goby perched in the drain side and has been living there for over 6 months.

 

[Fishurama]

So, I have a setup that is less than 6mos old. 36 bow front with fish only, researching corals soon.

I love my sand but now it is covered in brown diatoms. I have my own rodi and my numbers are good. My mistake was too much uv light with my new light setup. I will be vacuuming with the sock. But won't that just spread the diatoms? My turbo snails aren't able to keep up anymore. Suggestions please?

Most if not all tanks that are newer go through a phase most call "the uglies" where diatoms pop up. I suggest getting a goby, the diamond a few have posted(including myself) on here work wonders. There are other types of sand sifting gobies as well but those mentioned above seem to work best and are cheap. Your LFS will most likely have a few for sale if not.

diamond goby link

Once you have him moving your sand around most will go away within 2 weeks to a month, you can help stir the first 1/4 inch of sand too.

 

[jda]

I should say that my current sandbed in my Oceanic (that should date me) is from about 2000. I have added sand over the years, moved it once (kept it in the bottom - talk about heavy) and I have cleaned it about every 4 years. While most tanks are probably not all that old, there is not expiration date on a sandbed.

 

[drblakjak55]

90g mixed reef. 100 pounds rock. Two inch sand bed. Every week I turkey baste the rocks and turkey baste the sand. Stick the baster to the bottom and blow. All the light debris goes into the water column with the wavemaker all on high about an hour. 200ü Mesh socks clog up by next day. Water back to clear and all the corals on major feed alert with all the junk floating around. Once a month I do 25% water change right after blasting everything. I’ll add whenever I see a little yellow discoloration on the sand, probably diatoms, 20cc vodka for two nights and it’s gone. Nitrates around 20. Phos at 0.4 Dose nothing

 

[Entz]

I agree with getting the correct critters helps a lot. Though I do clean a section of mine once every few weeks.

My first tank crash, few years ago, I am very sure was one of those "the sand bed got full (phosphate)" combined with the bad luck of my Chaeto reactor going offline (light strip went up in smoke) caused things to get out of control fast. Hindsight and all that...

I've had mine for 5 months. getting really skinny. read on a different post recently you can try squirting food into its burrow. just started doing it....we'll see.

Mine eats Mysis, though I may have just gotten lucky. I went for a while with no sand (Dinos) and he survived just fine.

 

[sghera64]

I have ignored my sandbed for as much as 6 months. I've also had "mysterious" bouts of cyano, GHA and other struggles which may, or may not, be related.

After reading posts on R2R (Brandon) and watching BRS videos, I found a very cheap, fast and easy way to care for my sand. My sand is almost 20 years old. It is 3-4 inches deep (down from 4-5 inches). It is now very fine, from what used to be medium coarse. I cut the bottom off of a 2L pop bottle and drilled a large hole in the screw top big enough to wedge siphon tubing into it.

My tank is about 4 feet above the floor. I start a siphon to a bucket on the floor with this aparatus and plunge the open bottom of the 2L bottle into the sand. The suction pulls the bottle deep into the sand. I then lift the bottle to break the suction, whereby the sand drops out and a slow gentle current lifts the "smoke-like" sediment up through the bottle and then down the siphon hose. I can do my entire 135 Gallon (6 Ft by 1.5Ft) tank by draining only 4 gallons of water out. I lose minimal sand and this contraption seems to go pretty deep into the sandbed.

If I do this 1 time every week to two weeks, the sand stays very white with no cyano or algae on it.

 

[kwirky]

1. Is having a consistent clean sand bed something that is sustainable?
There's lots of talk so far about sand beds which cover the entire bottom but there are more options than that. I went from a 40 breeder with 1/2" of sand to a 138g (reefer 525xl) and didn't add any more sand. 2/5 of my tank bottom has sand on it, most of it 1/4" deep. There's a square foot area which gets washed to 1" deep. It's a small amount so it's sustainable (not going to crash my tank).

I've had to resort to dosing nitrate so a sand bed which leaches nitrate over time is not a big deal. 1200 par over a chaeto fuge makes that a non-issue. Husbandry's so much different than in the mid 2000s when bare bottoms were gaining favor.

2. How do you keep your sand bed clean? What does your maintenance look like?
I don't have much for sand, so I plan on replacing 1/2 of it every 6 months. One big bag 2x per year. I have so little that it's trivial to clean it all with a gravel vac every week, only having to pull out 5g of water to do so. It's part of my weekly 10% water change which needs to be done any ways. 100% of it gets stirred up every week (even when I had the 40 breeder).

3. Any tips and tricks to keeping your sand clean?
Ignore the aesthetic appeal & only add the amount you need for the animals you're keeping. You can increase your tank's copepod diversity a fair bit with just a tiny bit of sand or crushed coral. You don't have to cover the entire bottom. Vacuum it weekly. Replace it on a regular schedule. If it's turning into cement there's too much, it won't be able to do its job any ways.

 

[Fishko]

Fork on a stick does wonders

 

[chadg]

Since I'm still new to this, I'm really not sure. The sand in my current system is very fine. Trying to vacuum it means lots of sand in the bucket. In the year that the tank has been running I've lost at least an inch of my 2 inches of sand and I'm down to the glass in the pistol shrimp cave, clownfish corner, and goby corner. Today was yet another week where the bottom of my bucket was covered in fine sand. Every round of cyano, diatoms, and goodness knows what that crap is, means more lost sand. Sure feels like a battle I can't win!

In my new tank I went with the larger Special Grade sand. It's still too new for me to have had a chance to test its cleanability but I'm sure hoping it's better. Stuff grows on sand, sand needs to be cleaned. I did pick up an Eheim Quick Vac Pro for the new tank. It would never work with the old fine sand (I imagine it would clog instantly) but hopefully it makes cleaning the new sand easier.

I'm with you I can't vacuum my cyano without taking all the sand with it! That said, I only started getting the cyano about 6 months ago and the tank is about 6 years old. I have NEVER vacuumed the sand before. Off / On how well maintained everything else was. Not sure why I had the cyano outbreak other than I did get my NO3 down to below 5 for the first time in 6 years and my PO4 was about .15. I thought those were good targets, but I'm really confused these days as I'm hearing anything from 5-20 on NO3 and .03 - .4 on PO4. Back when I started many years ago the target for both was 0! Now I can't tell what to shoot for. Does seem to correspond to when I reduced by NO3 though....

 

[Bob Weigant]

I keep the front of my tank bare and from the middle to back of the tank is where my sand is. Mostly for the wrasses and I just found it easier to manage

 

[Conrad Noto]

Today let's talk about a subject that has never been touched on in the aquarium hobby. Clean sand! HA!

If you're like me you love the look of sand in your aquarium. Clean sand, not dirty sand! If you have sand or have had sand you know that it can get dirty pretty quick and at times seems like an impossible task to always keep it clean. Can it stay clean with minimal maintenance? Can it be sustained? I know there have been times when I didn't touch my sand bed and it stayed very clean for long periods of times and then BAM it went down the drain and it became seemingly impossible to keep clean again. Let's talk about that today!

1. Is having a consistent clean sand bed something that is sustainable?

2. How do you keep your sand bed clean? What does your maintenance look like?

3. Any tips and tricks to keeping your sand clean?


Beautiful reef photo via @JohnnyTabasco

Vague question, depends on set up and what's in tank. I just stir weekly.

 

[Conrad Noto]

I'm with you I can't vacuum my cyano without taking all the sand with it! That said, I only started getting the cyano about 6 months ago and the tank is about 6 years old. I have NEVER vacuumed the sand before. Off / On how well maintained everything else was. Not sure why I had the cyano outbreak other than I did get my NO3 down to below 5 for the first time in 6 years and my PO4 was about .15. I thought those were good targets, but I'm really confused these days as I'm hearing anything from 5-20 on NO3 and .03 - .4 on PO4. Back when I started many years ago the target for both was 0! Now I can't tell what to shoot for. Does seem to correspond to when I reduced by NO3 though....

My tank is 9yrs, I rearranged rocks 3 months ago and boom, diatom outbreak. Really sucks, sometimes best just leave it when it works.

 

[foshizzle]

In an acro tank, I would happily give up the sand except that I love burying wrasses. In the 18 mos since I upgraded to a 180g, I've had repeated battles with spirulina covering my sandbed. I rarely had issues in my old 120. I think the reeflakes I used in the new tank may be the problem. My sand was way cleaner in years past when I used smaller grain caribsea. Currently, I run 4 MP40s and minimal rock, but I still get detritus settling in the sand.

My NO3 is very easy to manage at 10ish but my PO4 is always dropping below measurable levels in this tank (using Hanna low range). I wonder if the sand is sucking up the PO4 and then releasing just enough for the spirulina.

 

[SixtyFeetUnder]

In my experience they aren’t sustainable forever. I’ve had a tank for 15 years; gone through 2 moves, and the sand bed is a disaster every move. You can get it back to looking good but it takes extreme work. My new 200g build is bare bottom with starboard and I can’t imagine going back to dealing with a sand bed again. The dirty sand just always takes your eyes from the corals! Even if it’s possible for multiple decade tanks; for me the juice is not worse the squeeze.

 

[j.falk]

A clean sand bed...is not my thing!

BARE BOTTOM ALL THE WAY!

 

[Willylumplump]

I had 3 inch display and 8 inch in fuge. Sandstorms with vortechs . Tried crabs to clean..... fish eat them. Tried goby, would sift sand dropping everywhere. Saw a Jason fox video with barebottom, removed it all. It smelled like a sewer. Algae bloom after. Cycled out and never looked back. Barebottom

 

[jdstank]

3” sand bed and the diamond goby does the heavy lifting. Front of the glass is swept periodically with a stick but otherwise the goby seems to never sleep.

 

[WendyLady]

Most if not all tanks that are newer go through a phase most call "the uglies" where diatoms pop up. I suggest getting a goby, the diamond a few have posted(including myself) on here work wonders. There are other types of sand sifting gobies as well but those mentioned above seem to work best and are cheap. Your LFS will most likely have a few for sale if not.

diamond goby link

Once you have him moving your sand around most will go away within 2 weeks to a month, you can help stir the first 1/4 inch of sand too.

Thank you!