Play sand help.

[Burto]

I'm using 100 kilograms/220 pounds of what's essentially play sand in my tank without issues, the same sand is in another two smaller tanks, and a friend has 60 kilograms in his. It's probably worse than play sand, it has all sorts of bits of gravel and small rocks, and was full of twigs, gumnuts, bits of leaves, and loads of silt and clay that I rinsed out of it. It's probably more like 75 kilograms of sand after rinsing.
It was also $4.50AU per 20kg/44 pound bag, hard to beat that price.
Water was noticeably a bit cloudy for the first month or so but got clearer with each water change. No issues with sand in filters or damaging impellers, even on the smaller tanks where the filter intakes run straight to the impeller.

Just rinse what you've got thoroughly, until the water's running relatively clear from the rinsing bucket. You'll get a bit of cloudyness in the tank, but it should pass.

Or, take it to the beach, build a castle, and buy some pool filter sand on the way home.

 

[carsona246]

I have a canister filter with play sand, and have had no trouble. Once you rinse it out pretty well it stays at the bottom, and doesn't float around too much once disturbed

 

[spitz006]

Thanks a lot. And thank you for the conversions to LBs and USD.

 

[m1ste2tea]

Rinse it in a bucket and drain out all of the small bits so that you're left with only the bigger, heavier grains, this way you are losing some of the sand but you will never have cloudy water whenever fish dig into it. yes it is time consuming because you're doing only a little bit of sand at a time in the bucket but its better than not, and its cheaper than PFS

 

[spitz006]

It worked out well. You can check out pictures of my tank in the general brackish forum under the thread "brackish tank pictures". I've decided I want to use it in my 20 long tank that I'm going to set up for african dwarf frogs and a couple of different synodontis species. I thought I remember reading somewhere that you can leave a small layer of gravel under the sand and that might help to reduce air pockets. I'm just wondering if that will work in my case, because my gravel is large. About the size of grapes or marbles. It seems like air pockets waiting to happen. Should I use sand alone or on top of gravel?