sand bed cleaning

How often do you clean the sand bed?


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mrlavalamp

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Never

I have a diamond goby and engineer goby and nassarius snails.

Between those guys, I cant keep the sand in one place.

the diamond goby especially. He is always moving the sand from one side of the tank to the other. The best part is watching him cart his shell collection back and forth. He stacks them up between rocks and the piles sand on top while digging out underneath to make himself a little cave.
 

GradientHurdle

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How often do you clean the sand bed?
Great question with a variety of ideas on whether to disrupt it or not. I have a 120 gallons mixed reef (9 years mature) with predominantly SPS. I have conch’s along with other sand stirring creatures but I weekly just run my gloves finger or take a turkey baster and fluff the sand as I like to call it. My parameters are fine and there never has been an ammonia or nitrate spike post fluffing. I double the dose of micro bacter 7 (50 ml’s twice a week) to ensure there is an appropriate level of bacteria to metabolize the bad stuff. This is a reef right and reefs undergo a lot of tidal currents that churn the sand bed constantly. So I continued with that philosophy and have never let my substrate bed sit for more than two weeks. The corraline growth below the sand bed is ridiculous and seems to work. Just my experience.
 

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