Is it safe to remove entire sandbed at once?

Jake_the_reefer

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So my 20g tank has turned from being a show tank to a growout system/frag tank. I have about 20 lbs of rock and some nice sized chunks of marinepure in a hob filter. I would like to empty my sandbed to make it easier to lay down frag disks. Would it be okay to remove the entire sandbed at once or should I do it 25% at a time? Its extremely dirty stirring it up a little bit causes a black cloud. (This tank is rather neglected)
 

Dolelo96

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I siphoned out 1/4 each water change. You definitely want to do your water change after siphoning, because of the crud that may be stirred up
 

Sailfin11

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I would drain the tank, take all frags and rock out, remove the sand, rinse the tank completely, then add new water, and put everything back in. Taking out sand can cause a lot of problems and instability, but I believe doing it this way should avoid most of that. Essentially, you are creating a new system with the original live rock. Cheers
 

brandon429

why did you put a reef in that
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They did it wrong, BRS didn’t use a known safe order of ops. Here’s 30 pages of instant removes.

Jake you’ve seen this thread I thought



it’s safer to remove all at once since some systems have dangerous forms of waste in the bed, vs inert ones. Sectional removal is safe, people show but there are times we need it just done. In certain tank invasion scenarios we don’t want sectional removal to keep feeding the targets (dinos, we rip a lot of sandbeds to beat dinos then put back clean beds after)

If brs followed that operational flow=success

what not to do: instantly rob the tank of a massive organics cushion then continue minimal feeding and not changing water while shining full production lighting on the no bed setup. we do opposite: we rob waste in disassembly cleaning but decrease lighting and increase feed water change work for a month or so, anticipating needs. Jon opens the thread with two rip cleans in one month, on a perfectly running reef, then gets ICP data for his tank afterwards.

bacteria from a sandbed are not required in a reef system, and live rocks do not take on more bacteria to make up for lack of sand, we show.
 
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NanoDJS

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You have got some great advice here, and like was just said , I would only worry about the hydrogen sulfide. Just shut it down and remove all livestock , and then remove sand clean tank , add new water ect... dont do it "live" on the fly unless the whole tank is empty of life already. You might get a mini cycle after , but its only a 20g , I would just rip it down.
 

brandon429

why did you put a reef in that
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I’ve also began linking our sandbed work scope to what we see in reef convention tanks / recently moved systems who never fail to meet a start date $ and who never lose animals going or coming

detritus controllers. They relocate clean wet substrate.


has implications for cycle biology (nobody stalls, five hundred tanks ready by Friday) and huge conventions have no tanks with sandbeds showing dark zone stratification....nobody moves an old bed when cash and a start date is on the line. all reef tank convention instant reefs / $30K in animals housed as long as you want to keep the dates going simply transfer clean sand (if at all, bare bottom is raging currently) and established biofilters, namely live rock. Using that logic: it’s safe to remove sandbeds all at once because five hundred convention reefs for twenty years
 
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