" MY WHITE SAND METHOD "

[dankreef]

OTS is a joke. Its simply if you have a nano reef and have 20 gallons of water. If you have sand packed with crap and then you drop a rock on the sand. 100% of your water is going to be polluted. If I have a 600 gallon system with 30% of the bottom with sand (for wrasses ect) and I never ever touch it for 30 years i'm not going to have the same issue as the nano. FYI Lasse im sure knows what OTS is . I laughed .

And to the people saying you have hydrogen sulfide ect in your sand can you please explain to me how you test that I would love to know. Thanks. Unless your saying do triton test sample water. Then stir your whole tank and then take another sample to see what was released from the sand?

 

[Pocky]

I didn't test for hydrogen sulfide. I assumed from the black sand lurking underneath the white when I was turkey basting the sand to help lift detritus out. I have a 150 gallon so it is not a tiny tank and even 1.5-2 inches of sand caused plenty of trouble for me. Now I am keeping a lot less sand at about 1 inch and even bare in some spots. I may add more once I've got Lorenzo's white sand process perfected throughout the tank.

 

[CC13]

Like many others, I siphon/sift half my tank sand each eater change and there is a TON of gunk that gets pulled out even with pretty high flow, and skimmer that runs pretty aggressively and I don't really overfeed in my opinion. I can't imagine how dirty the sand is from a 4-5 or more year old tank.

 

[hatfielj]

I saw his video on youtube last week and it has been making me want to add a sand bed to my display. I just don't know if I'd keep up with the sand stirring though. Plus, it's another thing that would not get done when I'm out of town. I like having a bare bottom for ease of maintenance, but it sure doesn't look as nice as having a nice white sand bed. Tough decision

 

[Jrainey312]

I vacuum my sand bed everywater change and turkey blast the parts I cant get with the siphon

 

[brandon429]

Dank

a smell test is all that's needed, it smells differently than anything else you could be wafting at the moment, and black pocketing is nearly certain to contain it, as no substrate that is aerated goes black. it can still come from non blackened areas.

 

[brandon429]

Old tank syndrome is no joke. Old tank syndrome is getting a nano reef out to year 5 taking all kinds of pictures n posts and then very quickly without you doing anything wrong a given invader takes over the whole system and wont abate no matter how many partial actions we take.

Make a tank restoration thread to see, invite people to offer their problems for you to fix live time. The ones under ots will be readily apparent apart from the ones with just topical invasions. You can clean or work a topical invasion a few different ways, but there's not many alternate ways you can restore an OTS system without killing it and being filleted in public. There is a way though/in the sand rinse thread.

 

[Bob Lauson]

I love white sand but when I started reefing years ago I developed the understanding that stirring the sand bed to keep it white was a mistake. Never questioned it, never thought about other appoaches, just lived with dirty sand until my next water change/sand vacuuming.

Then I saw this thread today. The beauty of R2R is the variety of topics and smart people that don’t have opinions but actual experience they are willing to share. I am starting the stirring method tonight!

 

[brandon429]

you'll be feeding your animals with aggregates/ suspended marine snow as you are removing, which is a big reason the pro detritus cloud likes to have at least some waste in the tank and this still accomplishes our means of finally exporting v storing it. a nice balance.

 

[Kengar]

I am in process of setting up a 250. I will have a perforated plate supported 1 inch above bottom of tank with substrate spread across it. I will be running a closed loop system with two returns into the bottom of the tank, into this chamber. Thinking is that this reverse under-gravel setup will lift detritus up out of the substrate and keep it clean.

 

[brandon429]

I make my sandbed this clean once or twice a year



As that video was made to demo my no cloud post rinse, twelve years of coral and live rock sit out on the cabinet on dinner plates in the air for about half an hour. No kid gloves, the reef must and does adapt.

A 12 yr old one gallon packed reef with 5 inch dsb is a fine testbed for old tank syndrome biology. What this or any other one gallon true mixed reef will display in two years it takes fifteen years for a 150 to display.


A long term pico aquarist will be simply -forced- to take action by year three and sooner in one of these if one doesn't already show up expecting to take action... then, the true nature of reef maturation will be lightsped and it will all make sense. Action on your tank and it's compliant response will be commonplace and never discomforting. You'll marvel at the inaction of others in the face of such invasions, and plead with them from a unique perspective to change ways.

Guess what happens at year five, pure cruise control and no algae cleaning except cursory occasional glass cleaning while drained for the life of the bowl


Hand guiding is finite, they said my rinsing was resetting things but it was secretly painting everything with coralline or coral 100% because I was hand excluding space competitors against the items I like. cheated and blasted the bad stuff out for a while until only good stuff was left

 

[brandon429]

It doesn't matter if it's cheating, not what nature does, not following the rules of fostering biodiversity in a sandbed, or even heterogeneity among live rock residents (all very seemingly bad aspects of my method)

I'm in it for coralline covering every possible surface that isn't coral flesh (where can algae grow then)

I'm in it for coral mass produce (estimate 50+ frags traded to Kyle at mr aquarium Lubbock and Jason/ salt n more)

I'm in for disease-free bulletproof reefing able to withstand power outages temperature swings and complete draining.

I'm in it for a 100% repeatable consistent system that anyone could set up right now and it would not behave any differently for you than it does me, with zero biological lifespan limit, because the cure for old tank syndrome lies in clean reefing and you can micro model the proof and not have to wait four decades.

Coral disease is fully absent and always has been due to the exchange

 

[Proteus Meep]

Myself i vacuum the sand weekly as the way i remove water for the water change and replace half of the sand for new every few months...keeps it fresh and white...always done it this way

 

[Chrispaul]

Don't have any problems as I added an undergravel filter when I set this tank up, water never been so clear and No algae growth on the gravel bed!

 

[Lasse]

We know how to arrange any reef biosystem to be ageless even before it is made. Old tank syndrome is a condition of the nineties where everyone was scared to reef cleanly thinking that waste was the key to long term health.

Some of the tanks in that thread are great, old, and have detritus so it can't be claimed a guaranteed failure. I just claim it's a statistical one, not easy to advice others to replicate without variation and invasions cycling in and out

The clean reefer works more but merges with totally consistent outcome techniques. Stat win

If you want a testifiably better chance at not losing your first reef tank, or your old one, reef clean- only if you want strongest safety hedge for your tank. At other times people are doing experiments of their own with OTS, sandbed biodiversity, specialized animals or reef zones etc so those aren't rinsed or stirred

Clean reefing came about simply for those who want a guaranteed repeatable uninvaded way to reef. Whether in your tea cup or your nine foot tank, clean reefing always produces running reefs and threads for any example are on ready mode. Clean reefers pre empt, they're not reacting.


Old tank syndrome is beaten, dead, it's something a reef keeper causes on purpose but maybe unintentionally. All of us were originally instructed to hands off the sandbed (Berlin never allowed for disturbance, you'd be undoing the claimed nitrate reduction zone by introducing oxygen) and it took rule breaking, a demand for longer tank lifespans and challenging the teachers (with links, always with respect) to get there.
Berlin 3.0

This a way of explaining what´s happening - another way is that few tanks today reach a mature age and "sterile" tanks is a recent invention and there is few tanks with that type of maintenance schedule that have reach a mature stage. OTS - if it exist as a single cause depended phenomenon at all - IMO not caused by ackumulation of detritus (or its real name - particular organic matter with active bacteria population) - it is caused by a slow conversion to monoculture both in macro and micro fauna. For me - a untouched sand bed is A and O for a stable low maintenance system and as a source for low leakage of nutrients to micro/macro algae and zooxanthella into the water column.

However - it is a large differences between the stirr method and to siphon out POM (Particulate Organic Material also known as detritus) as fast as possible. The stirr method does not transfer out the detritus - instead it make it available in the water column to hungry mouths of coral polyps or other filtering organisms. Further - some of it will be relocated to low flow areas and some of it (a very small part) will be moved out by the skimmer. The stirr method is a part of my method too - but I´m a lazy guy and I let other organisms doing the job. Organism like pistol shrimps, hermits, sand-dwelling snails and sea cucumbers is active in my display tank. My sand is normally white because of their activities. In the start I stirr the sand in the Display Tank with a EHEIM grabber every second day - the last 1.5 years - it has not been needed.

How does this coincide with my opinion about a stable and untouched sand bed? The answer is simply - I separate the sand beds. My Deep Sand Bed is situated at the bottom of my refugium and I have a slow reverse flow through it (from the bottom an upp) - for the moment between 30 - 60 litres a day (24 hours).

Sincerely Lasse

 

[brandon429]

When you mention a slow conversion to monoculture

How can that be tested or replicated in a system that won’t take twenty years to demo?

Using only large systems as the inference model imo allows for too many attribution errors to outcomes

Everything but small reefing has opinions varying on causality of invasion, unstoppable eutrophication etc (and they never agree sandbed waste is it)

We are usually extrapolating the maturation process for old large systems in the theory portion of these pages, can you make a nano reef reflect that process somehow and will others see the same issues on the same timeline? We can show those processes in the smaller reef relating to, and being arrested by, solely the management of cloud in the system


My system still has pods and worms in the sand after rinsing, they are re seeded by the live rock over time but not as dense as the unrinsed bed. I must surmise no bacterial issues are caused by me simulating tidal flushing actions due to the age of the micro systems and the repeatability by others, I’m able to get more than a hundred systems from others on live feedback showing very streamlined maturation check points, all predictable


If your counter model for aging is repeatable it should be able to be predicted, and modeled, by many and if we use smaller systems it won’t take so long to know does that sound reasonable? You should be able to create the stratification or location of your test system sandbed in the smaller systems, downscale the bioloading to match, and be able to intercept any form of invasion or noncompliance ahead of time, without factoring in the sand since the goal here will be to foster diversity vs guide out diversity and keep only the adapted residents who aren’t affected by tidal action. * imo the test isn’t validated but you pulling it off, it’s validated when twenty others get the same result and you collect those all in one thread for pattern trending

There are members of flora and fauna who can’t be ejected by tidal action...someone always hangs on for sure, rinsing isn’t as thorough as it’s made out to be/my claim

I always like when you post bc nobody else has worked in aquaculture that I know here. You and I once discussed backflushing of large filters to get at detritus, how that’s required in production since bioloading outpaces natural means of balance in high production pools etc...I consider my sand rinse technique and what I advise others to do so we can get ahold of their invasions just another means of backflushing...detritus/POM excellent description. The way most people stock fish in a reef tank makes it more like production aquaculture vs natural models

Stick stirring is not flushing agreed it’s relocation and only partial export (whatever gets caught in filter socks due to the exchange) but at least it is not a compound storage action...the smaller actual export portion is still a net loss in overall density of POM/det ideally. it prevents stratification aging in the sandbed by keeping the detritus aerated, like in Paul’s RUGF approach, which is much safer mulm than mulm spending its time in anaerobic or totally anoxic conditions where metabolites from protein rot are usually lethal vs foodstuff when cast back up before reduction in that mode was complete (takes much longer to mineralize in restricted 02 zones)

Berlin method allows for no such action and pure storage, and only biological mineralization/cacheting the waste into the right zones, hopefully

I don’t consider hand guided tanks sterile, they’re just visually cloudless and therefore not as crash-prone or invasion-prone biologically. Anyone one of the entrants into this thread can be sandbed less, nothing to stir, and they’ll still see everyday compounding the very waste that would have been out of sight out of mind (right up till invasion time) and they’ll still be able to farm all the corals and pods we all like, microflora w self adjust ratios over time related to real estate changes/vital space changes made but I never viewed the pop shifts as sterility... merely selecting for only the bare essential reef guiders and not the rest of the cloud (reduced heterogeneity agreed for sure but as the solution to OTS and not the cause)

Mike Palettas article on OTS used key terms about pore plugging and detritus, if there is an alternate biosystem undescribed that accounts for senescence of the overall reef system then we should be able to model that with the general public for new feedback and articleworks

A water drop from your reef looks still like mine under the scope.

 

[Land Shark]

When you mention a slow conversion to monoculture

How can that be tested or replicated in a system that won’t take twenty years to demo? We are usually extrapolating the maturation process for old large systems in the theory portion of these pages, can you make a nano reef reflect that process somehow and will others see the same issues on the same timeline? We can show those processes in the smaller reef relating to, and being arrested by, solely the management of cloud in the system


My system still has pods and worms in the sand after rinsing, they are re seeded by the live rock over time but not as dense as the unrinsed bed. I must surmise no bacterial issues are caused by me simulating tidal flushing actions due to the age of the micro systems and the repeatability by others, I’m able to get more than a hundred systems from others on live feedback showing very streamlined maturation check points, all predictable


If your counter model for aging is repeatable it should be able to be predicted, and modeled, by many and if we use smaller systems it won’t take so long to know does that sound reasonable? You should be able to create the stratification or location of your test system sandbed in the smaller systems, downscale the bioloading to match, and be able to intercept any form of invasion or noncompliance ahead of time, without factoring in the sand since the goal here will be to foster diversity vs guide out diversity and keep only the adapted residents who aren’t affected by tidal action. Those members of flora and fauna who can’t be ejected by tidal action, someone always hangs on for sure, rinsing isn’t as thorough as it’s made out to be.

I always like when you post bc nobody else has worked in aquaculture that I know here. You and I once discussed backflushing of large filters to get at detritus, how that’s required in production since bioloading outpaces natural means of balance in high production pools etc...I consider my sand rinse technique and what I advise others to do so we can get ahold of their invasions just another means of backflushing...detritus

@brandon429, no offense but the way you write it is difficult to understand and seems gibberish. The words themselves I completely understand, its the way you use the words that is so odd.

That aside, you are clearly trolling Lasse and I don't get it. Lasse has years of experience and consistently demonstrates his credibility as he shares his knowledge. If you want to understand the various definitions of trolling and which form(s) you fall under, see https://www.lifewire.com/types-of-internet-trolls-3485894. Numbers 02, 05, and 08 come to mind.

 

[kaduozores]

I didn't read all posts, but I just wanna give my advice.
I think you don't need to stir your sand, just add a fish that do it for you, like a gold head sleeper goby, or a diamond goby, snails and sand starfish.
Here I have 3 sand starfish and one gold head sleeper goby in my 280g, my sand is allways white and clean. I believe they also prevent the accumulation of waste in the substrate.

Here my Tank

 

[brandon429]

Land shark


You are as far off base in contribution here as humanly possible.

What you wrote has literally no contribution to the thread but I’m sure that wasn’t your goal.


What links do you have of works you’ve done that contribute to the discussion here

If it turns out you have zero works collected then feel free to use any words or phrasing you feel comfortable using to describe detritus, how you think it factors into tank aging or invasion etc






your post was the first trolling that didn’t contribute anything at all to the science of ecology and the first personal attack. Hopefully both you and your backers will add to works here with links and not sideline activity
Nobody is trolling Lasse.


Lasse doesn’t need to see my works and I don’t need to see his links and works, familiar territory, we’ve been communicating just fine for years and I already know his work... would like to see what you’ve earned in your works that are relevant here, post up pls something specific


Anyone who makes a claim about reef tank aging ought to be able to model that in smaller setups, there is no harm in asking for feedback on that


Instead of more type, make your rebuttal a few work links to show where you stepped out of safety and comfort zone in others tanks and we can see how you factored detritus. I look for your proofs in the collected works of others tanks so we can see their evaluation of your method, and to see if you innovate for them and cause change

It will be great if your derail attempt doesn’t stick. It will be wonderful if a personal challenger can show some work done elsewhere, that compare and contrast would be helpful and not trolling. I’ve got a few work links handy to back my claims.


Show us your linked dedication to the cause-I’m sure you’ve been working diligently and collecting the actions that drive your position one way or another on sandbed biology, right?

 

[brandon429]

Kaduozores

Wonderful aquarium! If you used a stick to stir up a section of the bed would it still cloud heavily into the water? was curious how deep the fish has worked. That open accessible aquascape looks amazing and in balance for sure and your sandbed cross section looks clean as well