Sand substrate recommendations

[mike dunagan]

I have a tank black on black. I will never do it again. I would take it out and mix it with some white for that salt and pepper, but the wife will not allow it. I prefer black back with white sand.

 

[spirofucci]

Caribsea white african mix. It's worth it. Unless you have white colored fish, I think it brings out their colors. I love this stuff.

 

[Insidiac]

So I ended up splurging and decided not to do the PFS, instead I just got 120 lbs of aragonite sand by caribsea. Its very fine, sugar sized and nice and white/tan, like the beach. I also got some egg crate and cut it to size, also I wired all my airline tubing under the egg crate so the fish cant accidentally uncover the airstones. With the 120lbs I have a nice evenly flat sandbed about 2" thick, which is good enough since it had to cover the airstones, egg crate, and has to be deep enough to anchor plants properly. Thanks again for the responses everyone! I love this forum

 

[cichlidaddiction]

How hard is it for all you guys with sand to do your vacuuming? it seems when i do mine on my tank with mixed gravel and sand it seems the sand always gets sucked into my bucket

 

[Gruntking]

How hard is it for all you guys with sand to do your vacuuming? it seems when i do mine on my tank with mixed gravel and sand it seems the sand always gets sucked into my bucket

I just vacuum over my sand and the **** comes into the vac but not the sand. If you have alot of fish that move the bottom around youd probably want to stir up the sand every month or so just to suck up any feces that have been left under!

 

[Tonelocs]

here's the samoa pink sand in my tropheus tank

 

[EVOLTNVII]

i use white silica sand from Menards (50#=$6) mixed with a little bit of red flint gravel its looks great more off white so tank looks sort of natural to me.

 

[Kalen]

My Mbuna tank is black sand with a black background and I absolutely hate it. Their colors look great against it, but I can not stand how unnatural it looks. I've used pool filter sand in all of my other tanks and I love it, but after seeing it suggested here I may consider mixing some of it with black just to see how it turns out.

 

[Gruntking]

My Mbuna tank is black sand with a black background and I absolutely hate it. Their colors look great against it, but I can not stand how unnatural it looks. I've used pool filter sand in all of my other tanks and I love it, but after seeing it suggested here I may consider mixing some of it with black just to see how it turns out.

I too hate the black on black look. I have a friend that has a blue background and black gravel and it looks alot better IMO.

Try pool filter sand and then add around 20 lbs of the black sand and you should get a nice mix that will pop their colors more.

 

[Soggy]

This is a video I made of dumping pool filter sand into my tank to show how fast it sinks.

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