Remote sand bed/refugium setup advice

[Michael White]

Doing my initial water fill on my 210 reef tank startup soon. Going with bare bottom and dry rock aquascape. The plan is to place a remote sandbed in my sump as part of my refugium and I’m looking for advice. I’ve had experience with sand and bare bottom setups, and see the advantages of both as they really represent different parts of the reef. I have a 100gal rubbermaid stock tank as my sump with external return pump. My protein skimmer and heater will also be in this refugium/sump.

Considerations:
-Best sand for this application- crushed coral or small grain sizes(for pods/chemistry buffering/etc)
-place sand in a removable trough inside my sump so it can be removed and cleaned easily(less volume), or just directly in the entirety of the bottom of the stock tank(for greater volume)?
-chaeto and other macro algae recommendations
-how deep of a sandbed? For ease of cleaning(if necessary) or for effective dsb( if that even makes sense, I do not like a dsb in the display)
- to clean or not to clean this remote sand bed?

 

[lapin]

The crushed coral will be great for worms pods ect. It will not be so great as it will trap a lot of crud. If you wish to clean it do keep it in a container. I like ulva, not chaeto.
3" SHOULD BE MORE THAN ENOUGH (ITS NATIONAL CAPS DAY)

 

[Subsea]

I am old school with respect to sandbeds. If you have to clean them, it means you don’t have enough biodiversity in your janitor crew (worms & pods and things). It is not necessary to have a DSB for diverse micro fauna & fana. I converted a 20 year old Joubert Plenum with 6” sandbed into a reverse flow 3” deep sand bed made from special reef grade aroggonite at about 0.1 to 1.5 mm grain size.

Build Thread - 25 year old 75G Jaubert Plenum on top with 30G EcoSystem Mud/Macro

The tank has seen little change in 25 years. Jaubert Plenum was designed to use facultative bacteria in a low oxygen environment to perform denitrification biochemistry. Substrate was 6” deep with false bottom making a Plenum under substrate. Plenum performed well until the introduction of...

www.reef2reef.com

Ron Shimek's Website...Deep Sand Beds

Dr Ron Shimek's Website - Information on animal groups, husbandry of coral reef aquarium animals, his passion for native Montana orchids, Ron's blog and online articles

www.ronshimek.com

The infauna are "the clean-up crew" and the "reef-janitorial" staff, and the array found in a successful tank may be DIVERSE! More than 200 different species commonly are found living in a mature sand bed. These include many types of flatworms, round worms, dozens of species of bristle worms, small snails, brittle stars, small sea cucumbers, protozoans, and many types of small crustaceans. The total populations may be immense. I have done sampling to measure the abundances found in the 45 gallon tank I mentioned earlier, and the number of animals larger than half a mm, or about one fiftieth of inch, in that tank ranges from 90,000 to 150,000 depending on what part of their population cycle the various species are in. ]


Left. An harpacticoid copepod, about 1/50th of an inch long. Barely visible, these small crustaceans are an important part of the food chains and clean-up crews in our tanks. They live on and in the sediments. Center. A group of tube-dwelling bristle worms, probably chaetopterids, in my 60 gallon Stichodactyla tank. These animals are primarily filter feeders catching small particles with their paired feeding tentacles. Left. The head end of a small predatory bristle worm called a syllid. These probably eat other small worms and move through the sediments in search of them. This worm was about 1/10th of an inch long.



[What does this diverse and abundant array of critters do for and in the sand bed? Well, some will eat excess food, detritus, or algae. In doing so, they utilize it, and excrete part of it as waste. In turn, bacteria utilize that, and thus the infauna help keep the biological filter going. Additionally, many infaunal animals burrow ingesting some sediments as they go. They digest the microorganisms off of them, opening space for bacteria to grow.]

Last edited: Yesterday at 6:43 AM

 

[jda]

Mixed grade reef type sand is good. 6" will provide the best denitrification. More surface area is better for the critters.

 

[Subsea]

@Michael White
Were you looking for a denitrifying remote deep sand bed? I thought you said, “as part of my refugium”?

 

[Michael White]

@Michael White
Were you looking for a denitrifying remote deep sand bed? I thought you said, “as part of my refugium”?

Wow, that’s great information
Not really, just to help with pod reproduction and to increase surface area for beneficial bacteria. Counting on the macroalgae for nitrate and phosphate export. Will have a skimmer in the future once the tank is being fed heavily.