- Joined
- Dec 2, 2019
- Messages
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What are the pros and cons of vacuuming the sand bed? I’ve heard of some people doing it but I’ve never done it.
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What are the pros and cons of vacuuming the sand bed? I’ve heard of some people doing it but I’ve never done it.
Here I will sum it up for you.
1. I vaccum my sand bed and the tank is pristine.
2. I never vaccum my sand bed and the tank is pristine.
It depends on if it is mature or not. You are going to get a lot of venom and bile about sand beds and nearly all of the people posting have no idea why/how what happened in their tank happened.
If the sand bed is mature and an active bio filter (this can take years), then you need to only do small parts of it at a time.
If the sand bed is not an active bio filter, then you can pretty much do what you want... this includes young sand beds and shallow ones.
I would caution you to take most of what you search and read in the last decade with a grain of salt since almost nobody knows what they are doing with them anymore and their experiences are short and knowledges is passed-down and not earned. Some of the older stuff is better and more accurate since people used to have more success with them before the "biocube generation" of reefers around the late 2000s.
I have never used a plenum, so I have no real thoughts. Biology and chemistry has not changed since Jaubert developed the german plenum system, so all of the books and articles should still apply in the same ways.
That sums it up LOL.Here I will sum it up for you.
1. I vaccum my sand bed and the tank is pristine.
2. I never vaccum my sand bed and the tank is pristine.
I'm aware that the basic laws of marine biology have not morphed in the last 30 years, thanks...
Most of what was published on this by Jaubert/Goemans and in FAMA, etc was before anyone kept these systems long term.
I’m trying to figure out if my results were an anomaly, and the only way to do that is to ask those who have been around long enough to have tried.
Most people seem to think that biology and chemistry have changed, so you are one of the smart ones... seriously. It is a big gripe of mine and one of the reasons why I just think about disappearing some of the time since people have gotten so dumb... and impatient.
There are many, many pages on Wet Web Media about plenums, but the format sucks and is not any better than when you likely read them years ago... but it is there.
I never went with a plenum because a 3" sand bed would keep the nitrates at .1, so why give up more tank space to a plenum when I already had all of the denitrification that I could want. This is why I never went with a 6" like Dr. Ron suggested all of the time.
The closest that I ever came to a plenum was taking over the care of a very large FO tank with under gravel filters. This was a display at a dentist's office. I stopped using the filters, but left them in the tank and the nitrate went down over the next 5-6 months. I guess that these would act as a poor-mans plenum. My only experience is that algae came as the N got low enough not to poison it, and then left again after it got low. The N was about 300 to start. It took a while for these oxic areas in the under gravel filter to get to be anoxic. Nitrates were "clear" when I moved away and handed the tank off to somebody else to maintain.
Generally speaking to everybody, there are pages upon pages of Berlin, plenum and other methods on WWM, reefs.org and reef central - this board did not exist back then. There are also books by real authors that survived peer review, the vetting of publication and editing process and have actual science in them... like real stuff. Probably smart to not discard these. Berlin has been, and still is, the most successful reefing method to date. It would be a shame to not look at this stuff in lieu of some thumb-suckers with boogers on frag plugs who can post online and think that their experiences are equal.
Most people seem to think that biology and chemistry have changed, so you are one of the smart ones... seriously. It is a big gripe of mine and one of the reasons why I just think about disappearing some of the time since people have gotten so dumb... and impatient.
There are many, many pages on Wet Web Media about plenums, but the format sucks and is not any better than when you likely read them years ago... but it is there.
I never went with a plenum because a 3" sand bed would keep the nitrates at .1, so why give up more tank space to a plenum when I already had all of the denitrification that I could want. This is why I never went with a 6" like Dr. Ron suggested all of the time.
The closest that I ever came to a plenum was taking over the care of a very large FO tank with under gravel filters. This was a display at a dentist's office. I stopped using the filters, but left them in the tank and the nitrate went down over the next 5-6 months. I guess that these would act as a poor-mans plenum. My only experience is that algae came as the N got low enough not to poison it, and then left again after it got low. The N was about 300 to start. It took a while for these oxic areas in the under gravel filter to get to be anoxic. Nitrates were "clear" when I moved away and handed the tank off to somebody else to maintain.
Generally speaking to everybody, there are pages upon pages of Berlin, plenum and other methods on WWM, reefs.org and reef central - this board did not exist back then. There are also books by real authors that survived peer review, the vetting of publication and editing process and have actual science in them... like real stuff. Probably smart to not discard these. Berlin has been, and still is, the most successful reefing method to date. It would be a shame to not look at this stuff in lieu of some thumb-suckers with boogers on frag plugs who can post online and think that their experiences are equal.