Cloudy water after adding sand

[Schteeve]

Hey all!
how long (in your experience) does it take for the water to clear up after adding your Aragonite (live)?
im not in a rush - just very excited

 

[Terry C86]

mine cleared up in about 24 hours

 

[Snookin]

Usually a few days max. What size tank? What type of sand? What type of mechanical filtration? Just a few of the many variables that effect this.

 

[Wolf89]

Not sure if this only applies to dry sand, but if I had not rinsed my dry argonite, I dknt think my tank would have ever cleared up. I put water through 120 lbs of it for 5 hours straight, milky white water the whole time, before it finally went clear

 

[brandon429]

Redo it as rinsed if your tank is accessible. Drain and catch water, rinse sand in tap till cloudless, then saltwater or ro, back in tank, refill w extracted water

Cloudless is the right start

 

[Schteeve]

Hi everyone,
my tank is 6' long x 1' 2" deep x 1' 6" tall
I added 2 bags of CaribSea Aragonite for a total of 80 lbs
I was a bit upset about this as the sand wasn't nearly as fine grain as i wanted it to be.
with 420L of water in the tank I have no way of practically extracting all the water to change to a finer grain, or to even remove the sand and wash it.
I dont have any mechanical filtration in place (yet) but im running my skimmer hoping it will help to get all the cloudiness out.

It seems like a bad(?) thing to do - washing your *live* sand. isnt the point of buying live sand that its full of bacteria? washing seems like you're washing the extra money you spent to get live sand, as opposed to dry sand, straight down the drain

 

[Snookin]

Hi everyone,
my tank is 6' long x 1' 2" deep x 1' 6" tall
I added 2 bags of CaribSea Aragonite for a total of 80 lbs
I was a bit upset about this as the sand wasn't nearly as fine grain as i wanted it to be.
with 420L of water in the tank I have no way of practically extracting all the water to change to a finer grain, or to even remove the sand and wash it.
I dont have any mechanical filtration in place (yet) but im running my skimmer hoping it will help to get all the cloudiness out.

It seems like a bad(?) thing to do - washing your *live* sand. isnt the point of buying live sand that its full of bacteria? washing seems like you're washing the extra money you spent to get live sand, as opposed to dry sand, straight down the drain

Don’t listen to the people that say remove and wash in tap water. That’s just bad info. Let it run it’s course and run mechanical filtration like socks or floss to remove the fine sediment. Cloudiness should be gone in a couple days. FYI skimmer will do nothing to alleviate cloudiness.

 

[Schteeve]

Okay, I'm looking at a Red Sea 100 micron Felt Filter bag. Do these restrict the speed of water flow very much? (provided i keep them clean)

 

[DMG Reef]

Don't listen to people who tell you not to rinse your sand. There's no good reason to put all that silt and fine particles into your reef.

I rinsed my Carib-Sea Special Grade sand when I set up my new tank and was shocked at the amount of silt in those bags. I had no cloudiness at all after rinsing in tap water. I'll never NOT rinse sand before using it. And rinsing didn't have any impact on my cycle. I had live rock for bacteria.

Your tank can clear up in time, but I doubt that you'd ever get all that silt out with filter socks. You'd have to stir up the sand and hope that the silt would make it to the socks before it just settled on your rocks and/or corals.

 

[brandon429]

Tap rinsing delivers bacteria to your sand, some of them are live nitrifers out of the tap, it doesn’t sterilize it. Any cup of water taken from a home tap is chock full of live bacteria due to pipe scum sloughing and tiny trace amnts of chlorine can’t kill that bac, our rinse dwell time is too short and tap cannot sterilize a surface even if contact time is extended.


First page, we link to some non rinsed starts.

Official Sand Rinse and Tank Transfer thread

If you are reading this thread to cure a tank invasion from a link I sent you, we do not need to identify your type of invasion here we do not need you to test anything at anytime regarding nitrate, phosphate etc Above all, we do not need to see a microscope slide picture of your invasion at...

www.reef2reef.com

*your tank is indeed large, you can use clarifier packets to floc out the clouding it will get better in time. It’s merely ideal to pre rinse but not required.

 

[jaxredsoxfan]

This has been a topic of discussion for a while. I am in the camp that says you can't rinse off bacteria in the sand, so the issue becomes particulate matter going forward. Personally I would deal with it now and remove sand and rinse. I think it will clear up on its own but that particulate matter will not just go away- it will settle back down into the sand. Fell its better to deal with it now rather that when you have a tank full of coral or fish. Good luck

 

[lbiminiblue]

I would say leave the sand, agitate with a stick or something every few hours and let your system pull the cloudiness out if it bothers you that much. And for future reference, I would start with majority dead sand and just grab a cupful of live from an actual aquarium, like an LFS.

Throw in multiple power heads to really get things going if you want. I understand it’s hard to be patient with it but that’s a very factor much of the time in this hobby.

 

[brandon429]

Agreed Jax
and then we’ve got the +5 yrs down the road effects from silty sand / cyano invasions and nearly lost investments shown. Hands off sandbed/ disaster in time for majority of large tankers, we show. Highly studied topic all in one place.

We are contemplating with you the very easiest access you’ll ever be required to make on this tank, when it’s new before packed with five K in corals. That doesn’t mean lack of initial rinse caused cyano for the example tanks in our thread, initial clouding isn’t detritus it’s just silty fraction. It was the learned behavior of no access/ can’t access for reason X that gets ‘em in five years. I think you might want to remove the whole bed and not put it back, see outcomes logged...reverse engineer the outcomes we collected into a different outcome for your large tank. Some people with large tank sandbeds stick stir them routinely as mentioned above to cast out the waste

 

[Schteeve]

Thank you all so much for the advice!
after running my powerheads, pumps and the skimmer for 24-hours a fair amount of sludgy stuff came up into the collection chamber of the skimmer but there was no noticeable change in the clarity of the water.
i would just leave to keep running until its all cleared up but my return pump started to change in the sound it produces while its running.. made me think it might be clogging up? so I've turned it all off and I think I'll extract the substrate and give it a good rinse. I'm cursing myself for not rinsing it before hand

 

[WVNed]

80 pounds of crushed coral, no rinsing

After 2 days
I don't run filtration. Just a new skimmer.

3 days

 

[Schteeve]

whaaa? why isn't mine behaving T_T

 

[vetteguy53081]

Very normal for new or added sand. I use filter sock to entrap sedimemts/suspended matter.

 

[Qasimja]

could also try running carbon

 

[Snookin]

whaaa? why isn't mine behaving T_T

Because you aren’t removing the particulates. You need mechanical filtration. Stir the sand and use socks or filter floss. It’s not rocket surgery

 

[Schteeve]

Decided to empty my tank, wash the sand and start again.
Thanks for everyone's input but there's no cure for stupidity
#LessonLearnt