What's the consensus on using sand for a large predator aquarium? How do you keep it clean? I've always used aragonite sand in my marine reefs, but there's a big cleanup crew
Sand
- Thread starter MoparMuscle
- Start date
I find sand to be much better then gravel when cleaning the bottom, for spawning, and just looks in general. I ran with gravel for over 20 years and finally tried sand in a tank one day...I never went back! I have sand in my all my tanks now.(except bare bottom fry tanks)
I clean the sand in a similar fashion as gravel but only have to skim across the bottom with the syphon rather then having to "dig" into the gravel.
I house 4 wc groups of gibberosa and 1 wc group of frontosa in my 6 and 7' tanks and many other tanganyikan groups in 75's, 90's, 40 breeders, ect. The gibbs and fronts are pooping machines!!!
I believe the trick is to have a thin layer of heavy sand with decent flow and positioning from powerheads enough so the waste gets stired up into the filteration but not so much of a heavy flow where sand gets pushed into a pile
+1
Also, many people will put a powerhead or a wave maker on a timer to do a quick cleanup a few times a day with more delicate fish that can't keep up with higher currents for long periods as well.
I think I'll use a thin 1" layer of estes super reef, since it's supposedly ceramic coated and inert, not having an effect on pH. I have two Vortech MP40W 's, which I'll keep on wave mode. Having a ray should help keep it stirred as well.
