I don’t know if there’s a single right answer here. A lot of it comes down to mentality and what you believe the sand bed should be doing in your system.
For a long time I thought of sand as the reefing version of a dirty litter box. So much waste settles into it. If you stir it up, you can certainly watch the brown cloud of crud come out.
Because of that, my approach used to be aggressive siphoning during water changes. I would vacuum the sand bed every time. Over the years that shifted. First I moved to siphoning only portions of the sand at a time, rotating sections so the whole bed wasn’t disturbed at once.
These days I mostly leave the sand alone and put more effort into organisms that slowly clean and process it for me. The idea is letting biology do the work rather than constantly resetting the sand bed myself.
Things like:
• Sand sifting fish
• Sand sifting starfish
• Cucumbers
• Nassarius snails
• Pods
• I haven't tried a Conch yet but will on my next tank.
Many of these will continuously turn the sand over, consume trapped organics, break waste down and keep it oxygenated without the big disruptive events that come from heavy siphoning.
Personally I’ve just found that letting the sand bed function more like a living filter and less like something I’m constantly cleaning has worked better for me over time.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha.
