How Do I Do This?

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calpoly12

Feeder Fish
MFK Member
Nov 10, 2010
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Paso Robles, CA
How do I clean live sand?? I have and 8g Bio-Cube and need to do my first water change :nilly: I heard using air pump tubing and just skimming the top of the sand works. Then once your done drain the water out of the bucket and dump the sand back in. Any help would be great!!!
 
Is the grainsize large enough that you can use a gravel vacuum? That is what I would recommend. Otherwise stir it up gently and suck up the clouds of crud that come out. You will have some circulation, but your protein skimmer should pull lots of it, and your inverts will go to town eating it. I mixed up my sand bed today in my reef and my chalice coral was going crazy ha ha.
 
FLESHY;4706048; said:
Is the grainsize large enough that you can use a gravel vacuum? That is what I would recommend. Otherwise stir it up gently and suck up the clouds of crud that come out. You will have some circulation, but your protein skimmer should pull lots of it, and your inverts will go to town eating it. I mixed up my sand bed today in my reef and my chalice coral was going crazy ha ha.
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Unfortunately the grain size is to small :( but I will have to try and stir it up and suck some of it out. When you say stir it up, how much do you mean? For example, enough to just get the crud to come out of the sand or stir it up a TON. Much thanks!
 
I like to get my stuff pretty well mixed up. I vacuum pretty hard when I do clean.

When you do this with your finer substrate you are going to want to shut off all pumps etc because otherwise sand will get into the impellers and wear them down. You dont want that.

I give mine a thorough mixing though, just enough to get it loosened up and the gunk out of it really.
 
ah ok. Should I try and siphon with some air pump tubing or should I just use a larger gravel vac? I mean I do only need to take out like 2 gallons and the gravel vac will clear that fast, but it will get more. Opinions?
 
What kind of sand sifters do you have in your cleanup crew? Nassarius snails are very good at consuming waste, leftover food and stiring the sand up. A dozen of them in your tank should take care of all your sand maintenance for you. In 5 years of reef keeping i have only siphoned the sand during battles with cyano and diatoms and then only the top 1/16 inch that had the stuff growing on it.
 
EsoxAngler;4707409; said:
What kind of sand sifters do you have in your cleanup crew? Nassarius snails are very good at consuming waste, leftover food and stiring the sand up. A dozen of them in your tank should take care of all your sand maintenance for you. In 5 years of reef keeping i have only siphoned the sand during battles with cyano and diatoms and then only the top 1/16 inch that had the stuff growing on it.
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Unless you are using a deep sand bed, there is nothing wrong with cleaning it. You can prevent alot of the cyano problems this person is referencing having to deal with, and preventing cyano blooms is much more fun than combating them.

Less than 1.5" of sand = give it a good vacuuming; More than 4" of sand = just clean the top inch or so. There is very little benefit to having any depth of sand in between these amounts.

In working on tanks both personally and professionally in the last 15 years I have used both of these, and prefer to use a .5" sandbed of medium grain size you can thoroughly vaccuum. Its much easier to keep stable IME. I wouldn't use any at all if it didn't look so strange to me.

This being said, there are alot of ways to get things done in reefing. Find what works for you.

Nassarius snails are fun to watch, and they will bury themselves. This being said, I haven't found them to do much for the sandbed, and actually prefer meaty foods to detritus. (this is why you see them show up at feeding times) Small conchs and sand sifting stars will be more effective, though I think your footprint is likely too small for you to keep a conch healthy.
 
No reason to clean the sand? **** is in your sand. It will rot there, and continue to hurt your h2o quality until its removed. Thats a fact.
 
i used to stir it up pretty well the siphon the top layer along with any cloudy mess around then i would dump all the water out of the bucket and have a fine mes net to grab the sand, give the sand a quick rinse and put it back in the tank, then i would just top of with my salt mixed water :) in your case a vac would work to fast for you i would say go to homedepot and grab a smaller piece of tubing diameter wise and use that i did it in my fry tanks for f.w im assuming it would work the same in s.w
 
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