Official Sand Rinse and Tank Transfer thread

brandon429 · Feb 15, 2019

This is perfect to know as an update because it reminds us of extra options to use against highly adapted strains. I'm for using WA or the oxydator to battle them because once you discover the kill method then there's no more worry. Pick an intercept point to clean the tank out of detritus so that cross-invasions aren't supported and so that future cyano battles are reduced, but controls in the meantime that simply work to quell it are duly noted thanks for updating

Question

How much help is the chemistry aspect I pointed to in the other thread. I know those guys are studying and debating really in depth physical ecology, thought it might be a side input. Any actions discerned from that thread regarding N and Phosphate adjustment? they're debating the causes of cyano, so in that we should be able to engineer a stoppage.

Frogger · Feb 15, 2019

brandon429 said:
How much help is the chemistry aspect I pointed to in the other thread. I know those guys are studying and debating really in depth physical ecology, thought it might be a side input. Any actions discerned from that thread regarding N and Phosphate adjustment? they're debating the causes of cyano, so in that we should be able to engineer a stoppage.

There is a lot of knowledge on the other thread however there was not a lot of consensus on what is going on and in my case what would work. However they all did agree that the use of chemicals to control algae was not advisable. They also agreed that manual removal of the mats and not allowing them to form was good.

As I do not have a nitrogen phosphate issue it was not a major factor we discussed.

brandon429 · Feb 17, 2019

https://www.reef2reef.com/threads/live-sand.557057/#post-5717717

I wanted to link this thread so that detractors of initial sand rinsing can have a place here. This back and forth is what drives development

There is a running, continual thought mode involving -consequence- of handling sandbeds. Touch it, rinse it, and something bad will happen... bac will be lost causing X domino effect... something we could actually measure pre and post rinsing would change if we clean the sandbed with tap water initially.

many new reef tank keepers are hesitant to clean, hesitant to act early, and unsure of how to access a sandbed deep into their reefing career-we hope to impart powerful control over the system right up front.

That first initial rinse is the inauguration into not losing tanks, taking control and accountability for the performance of the aquarium.

brandon429 · Feb 17, 2019

How bout this one, skipped initial rinsing

Rock slide = concerns

https://www.reef2reef.com/threads/sandbed-stirred-up.544852/

Spanky05 · Feb 23, 2019

@brandon429 im setting up a tank. Help me with my timeline:

Sanblast 4 new bags of caribsea special grade live sand.
I didn't mean to buy life sand but I have it so may as well rinse it.
How long can I have this rinsed with Waterhose and then stored in a container with RODI before I need to have it set up in my tank?

Once I uncover it with rodi, how long can it sit in my tank figuring out rockwork before it causes me issues?

Thanks for all your help!

brandon429 · Feb 23, 2019

thank you for posting

Full rinsing will not change its storage characters, rinse either now or later

Hydrated media, any form of fluid in a bag of contaminated water exposed to air -will not- lose nitrifers and even if it did, your sand isn't the main source. Making it cloudless is first priority and rinsing doesn't unstick filtration bacteria from grains as they're housed in biofilm. The right way to store it is uncapped somewhere in saltwater kept topped off, doesn't have to be circulated or heated. Capped can go anoxic if contaminants get in, aerated is safer storage and the only help the bacteria require is hydration

I'm 100% certain if I took samples of anyone's best rinsed reef sand, and sprinkled it across sterile agar microbial growth plates then incubated it for 48 hrs, it would grow more than one type of bacteria and likely fungus and mold brought in via aerial+ surface vectoring during handling.

Someone should test two batches of sand for nitrifying ability, one is pre rinsed and one is not

bigcheese · Feb 26, 2019

I can toss a (long) story onto this thread... maybe not quite as scientifically rigorous as I wish it were, but definitely supports the theory.
The TL;DR crowd can just skip to the bottom or read the bold.

My 12yo wanted to start his own reef tank, so we grabbed a 75G last year. Started with about 20lb rock... some wet / live, some dry, and 4 bags (80lb) CaribSea Special Grade. The point was to get all the flat(ish) pieces from the LFS to act as a stable base on the glass, scape the sand around the base rock and fill to start the cycle. We'd add more LR later as he decided on a layout.
No rinsing. Big mistake in retrospect, especially since one of the bags was "weird"... way drier than the rest with some concretions and clumps.
Days 1-3, the tank was opaque from the cloudiness, despite the floc pouches.
Day 4 was nice and clear, but the filter socks all needed to be cleaned. Did nothing until Day 7, letting everything equalize and "burn in test" all the pumps / plumbing, etc.
Day 7 I dosed 3ppm ammonium chloride and started testing. At day 10, Ammonia had dropped to 1.5ppm. Good. Nitrifiers working. No need to grab any bac in a bottle.
Early AM on day 12, nitrites were 3, nitrates started to get detected. Tank kinda cloudy again. (huh?)
Late on day 13, I did a full battery... Ammonia at 8ppm+, Nitrites at 1.5, Nitrates at 40. what the heck? pH dropped to 8, Alk at 10dKH, PO4 still nowhere to be found. But salinity jumped from 35ppt to 45ppt (1.035) with no significant evap loss.
With no RODI on hand, a quick 20G WC with Primo water to get back to 1.026. That's when I noticed white slime in the sump. And rocks. And top 1/3 of the glass where the water once was.
Spent the rest of the night on R2R figuring out what the heck was going on.
Spoiler alert: at least one bag of sand was the culprit, and had to be about 50% salt instead of sand. No idea where the white slime bacteria came from, but Yankee Candles are banned from my house and we don't use aerosol air fresheners. It obviously hates high salinity and the massive die off was the cause of the ammonia spike.
Days 13-26: Daily small WCs. One 75% WC. Fought white slime. Lost. ;Blackeye Raised white flag. Tank looked like Bill Murray in Ghostbusters. But, ammonia down from 8ppm to 0, nitrites 0, nitrates 160+; so there's that.
At peak on day 21/22, system was adding 40ppm NO3 daily... meaning it was also converting 40ppm NH4 and 40ppm NO2.
Tore the tank down that Saturday. Everything got bleached- the sump, tank, all the pumps, heaters, plumbing, etc. Scrubbed the rock lightly with hot water and about an 0.25% bleach solution (Clorox Hard Surface)...
But I didn't toss the sand. LFS only had one bag of sand, which wasn't enough to get going again. I rinsed it all with tap water + very dilute bleach, then hot tap, then fresh SW. Stored it overnight in the basement in dark 5-gal buckets, capped, with SW.
"Not a pro" tip: I used some fine fiberglass screen (the kind you repair screen doors with) over the top of a bucket and rinsed in 10-15lb batches. Way easier than the siphon tricks.
In the morning, rinsed all the hardware with RODI and set it all back up again. Light cloudiness, went away within 30 minutes.
Quick test: 0 NH4, 0 NO2, 0 NO3, 1.026 salinity. Dosed 3ppm NH4Cl at about 10pm and went to bed exhausted.
Monday morning came too early, and I forgot I dosed the tank the night before. I dosed it again before work, then realized my mistake. Glad there were no fish in there.
Got home around 6 and ran a test. 0ppm NH4. 0ppm NO2. 5-ish ppm NO3. No freakin' way! Alright, the tests must be off. Double check, triple check. Same numbers. Checked to see if the ammonia I used was still ammonia. Yep. Let's try this again.
Dosed NH4Cl to 5ppm at about 7pm. By 7am, NH4 and NO2 were 0. NO3 was 10. Nitrosomonas to Nitrobacter for the win, baby!
#Takeaways:

I will never not rinse sand going forward. It's not worth the cloudiness or potential headache from whatever might be in there.
R2R is your friend when no one else can figure it out. Mad props for yous guys. er, all y'all.
If a rinse with light bleach didn't materially affect the nitrifying bacteria, rinsing with water alone is not going to have any effect.
I am a firm believer in the deep clean, it's a carryover from my FW habits. I do the whole bed every other WC (about every 2 months). Might seem aggressive, but we have no picky eaters that rely solely on benthic plankton for food (which seem to be the biggest casualty).
My CUC is far more aggressive at taking out the occasional diatom patch or GHA sprout, leftovers from feedings get enthusiastically cleaned from cracks and crevices. I attribute this to having less edible detritus in the bed, so they have to earn their keep.
There's negligible cloudiness during a cleaning, not much more than my Engineer Goby kicks up digging a new tunnel. Even so, I grabbed a polishing filter with DE to use during the cleaning so there's zero that ends up settling out of the water column (Marineland Magnum, FWIW).

brandon429 · Feb 26, 2019

Big cheese thanks tons for posting that, I really enjoyed reading it all for sure, great documentation

wesman42 · Feb 26, 2019

How would someone go about replacing all of the sand in a system?

brandon429 · Feb 26, 2019

We usually like to start with a full tank pic so we can gauge the balances of rock vs bioloading in the tank

If there’s enough live rock then we pretty much just take down the tank and remove or replace the bed all at once since the bacteria in the sandbed don’t matter if there is enough active live rock to handle filtration

Let’s see pics am curious.

we approach sandbed care and handling using accurate bacterial science-at no time do rocks take on or build up extra bac to take over losses from a sandbed, this isn't how bacteria work. If surfaces in a tank didn't manage their own bac levels we'd all have opaque water excessive bacteria tanks round the clock

the levels of bacteria waxing and waning on live rock run independent to sandbed bacteria, so when a sandbed is pulled out or cleaned all at once we know that live rock already manages it's surface area to handle the bioloading just fine. I've never seen any reef tank use such little live rock that this transition won't work, in fact we usually use orders more live rock area than is needed to handle the fish bioloading in a typical reef tank.

Predicting, avoiding and addressing the detritus clouding that comes along with sandbed work is the full job, we never consider or fear losing the bacteria in these pages as they're always fine without our help.

If you use normal live rock and if you can remove the bed without exposing sensitives to the water clouding, any bed swap will go fine. Detritus kills, not lack of bacteria

Frogger · Mar 20, 2019

Hi Brandon

Just wanted to let you know that a high level of vacuuming out the small amount of sand I have, combined with the constant removal of mats when they formed seems to have balanced out the equilibrium and cyano is not an issue.

During hightened cyano growth taking the rocks out scrubbing them and treating areas with H2O2 really only gave temporary relief from cyano. I works well on bryopsis. The cyano would return with a vengeance to the exact spot within days. Even though there were other areas where the cyano wasn't growing and never grew. Water motion and water borne nutrients played no role in where the cyano would grow.

I believe my problem likely stemmed from the imbalance I allowed my biological filter get by previous treatments with Chemiclean as it killed a lot of the beneficial bacteria as well. It seems tank biodiversity, clean sand beds and clean rocks are the key managing cyano.

cfendya · Mar 24, 2019

Just wanted to share my experience in this space as I just spent the better part of yesterday doing just this...Rinsing my sand bed.

A little background...Upgraded my tank from a 60G to 92G (100G in total water with sump) about two months ago. I moved all live rock, coral and fish, but went with all new sand (40lbs of Tropic Eden Reef Flakes - Live) and all new water. I never had ammonia problems or what I would call a tank cycle. Being in the hobby for just about 1.5 years I called the tank upgrade a huge success! One thing I did not do was rinse my sand prior to putting it in the new tank. My uneducated thought process was that the "live" piece would help with the move and prevent a tank cycle.

For a few weeks, the new tank and sand bed were doing great. I attributed the clean sand bed to a few things - high flow from two MP40's, better water chemistry, and all the great things I read about Tropic Eden. I have always been a sand stirrer as I love a clean sand bed and will syphon the sand not every water change but maybe every other. After a few weeks with the new tank, I started to get a light diatom bloom. I knew this was a potential in the coming so didn't put much thought in it....that is until they just kept coming and coming. They were growing everywhere!!

I thought I'd just syphon them out my next water change but knew I had a couple days before I was planning on doing a water change so I got in the tank with my turkey baster and went to work blowing the sand bed hoping to stir it up some and let the sump/filters do their job. In about 30 seconds, my tank looked like the first day I assembled the tank and dumped the sand in and much like the post above - https://www.reef2reef.com/threads/sandbed-stirred-up.544852/ . Here I was with a fairly decent amount of fish, light number of corals, and a wife staring at me like I had just killed the entire tank. Fortunately for me and the tank, after about an hour and changing out filter floss in the sump a few time, it mostly cleared up but now my rock and fish had this dust like and stringy material all over them

A few days go by and I'm on water change day so get out the syphon and go to work. Cloudy, murky water, just like I saw a couple days prior filling up my brute trash can. All I could think of while syphoning was...How am I going to get through the entire tank with only 15G of prepared water? That obviously wasn't going to happen so I finished as much as I could do and then set out on a mission to figure something out which brought me to this thread.

Because of a whole lot of factors, I didn't break down the entire tank but what I was able to do, I'd still call a sucess.

At a high level, I used a syphon to syphon as much sand as I could out of the tank. I would say I was able to remove somewhere between 80-90% of 40lbs. Live rock, corals, fish, etc all remained in DT untouched. From there, I took the sand in my brute trash can outside and with a hose and my hand stirred the sand until the water was clear. I could not believe the amount of stuff I was able to get out and wish I took pictures of the water prior to dumping it. The cloudiness, stringy white stuff, and of course diatoms was just amazing..especially after just two months!

After a thorough rinse and sand drained, I took the sand back in and filled the same can with RO water. I stirred the sand in effort to "dechlorinate" as best I could and then started adding sand back to the tank.

When I was putting the sand back in the tank, at first I was careful as I was still nervous of creating a cloudy mess but then realized there was nothing. Sand would quietly and gently fall in place with no mess. When I realized this, I just started taking large scoops of sand and just dropping it in the tank. Zero cloud, zero mess, it just fell in place as one would hope. My wife and I watched in disbelief and amazement as we were both so used to nothing but a cloud of mess occurring!

Overall, the process took me a few hours. I think if I had water pre-mixed and ready ahead of time (I did have to make a run to the LFS for RODI so had to take a break for about 1-2hrs), I could've done it in half the time. I'm honestly thinking of making it a yearly ritual and would guess with the right prep, I could do the entire tank in couple hours.

I know I'm still new to all this and not even a day post-rinse, but the tank hasn't looked this good since the day I moved stuff over. Yesterday before cleaning up and while smoothing out the sand, I was pretty deliberate in really moving the sand and again, no mess or cloud so my hope is when I get in there with my turkey baster the same will hold true.

Thanks for all that posted their success in this thread. I will say, I was super nervous about going through the process but reading about everyones process and success, it really wasn't all that bad and the benefit will surely be realized once complete!

cfendya · Mar 24, 2019

Just thought I'd share a quick pic of before and after. This is over 24hrs after and it's still looking great!

Prior to rinsing, I would need to GENTLY stir as best as possible twice a day to get it to look semi clean.

brandon429 · Mar 29, 2019

Hey look how many non pre rinsers ive backed edited into the first post

is caribsea going to be at aquashella? I want to thank them for the endless silt adventures, we got to be rule breakers/outlaws due to that unhelpful inclusion. We want future issues of caribsea sand to also state on the bag no pre rinsing is required, so that our thread w always be busy undoing that. very cool cycle, pun intended

brandon429 · Mar 29, 2019

Cfendya I want to thank you for working with us and providing after pics that are stunning, true application true follow up of skip cycle work has been shown fearlessly thank you very much
B

those could be dinos, did you ever get a cellular level ID on those was curious/scope pics somehow was curious

cfendya · Mar 30, 2019

brandon429 said:
those could be dinos, did you ever get a cellular level ID on those was curious/scope pics somehow was curious

I never got a scope level pic nor view but from what I understand, dinos form bubbles and I never got them.

Tank is still doing great. Stirring my sand is effortless now with zero cloud. I do have some spots where I know I wasn't able to get the sand out which when disturbed does produce a little silt but I can deal with that for now and I'll just make sure to hit that area extra long the next time I syphon

brandon429 · Apr 5, 2019

An article about sandbed cleaning.
https://www.reef2reef.com/threads/5-ridiculously-easy-ways-to-clean-a-marine-aquarium.581156/

How does that link below line up with our work here?

We do full work all at once because adhered bacteria are always enough, and because partial cleaning upwells nutrients into the water column as you separate the clean from the dirty sand within the tank water. Many times we are working on invaded tanks and this fuels the problem

If someone is cleaning a new, uninvaded system preventatively then partial work isn’t negative impact, it’s a form of export keeping waste from compacting into the bed and it’s suspension feeding your animals since it’s not gobs of half rotten protein mud from 2015. New tank detritus isn’t like old tank detritus. Most of it is your non pre rinsed silt

but after a few years, it’s total invader fuel to kick back up into the tank and the lone risk of recycle if the mud is kicked up into suspension

The older a system is and the more pent up with plants and locked-in waste plugging all the live rock pores it is, the more you need to stay away from partial work and get to fixing it all at once with full backflushing of every surface right now (basic filtration upkeep every zoo and production facility knows) which is the sole action we collect here.

Alexreefer · Apr 7, 2019

I Have been battling diatoms for months now and I am over it! Just found this thread and am willing to try this. @brandon429 How should I go about cleaning my sand. Taking out a cup every week until no sand then put all back after rinse? Also wont this start my cycle over again? My tank has been set up for 9 months now and I have never had this happen to me.

brandon429 · Apr 7, 2019

We strictly do it all at once it never recycles

To work in increments is not required. We do all these jobs all at once

Custom job guaranteed no recycle= post pics need to see scape details and tank volume then results will shine

Thanks tons for posting we will fix it

The basic approach is take out rocks use saltwater to flush them out, clean out any detritus like in a clean change bucket of sw

Then take the sand out and tap rinse it for half an hour till it's clear truly clear

Final rinse is ro water, to evacuate tap

Then put whole tank back together it doesn't recycle, this is our whole twenty pages of work and we'd love more work

You can rinse the entire bed all at once, we do, it's safer that way. What the masses do with partial removal isn't producing the cures it's the hands on work that sure will

Can't wait to see results