100 gallon tank = how much sand?

[kdblove_99]

Hello my GF dad has a 100G tank and is going to use sand. How much will he need? 100lbs or 150 or what?

[steeltown]

Hi.

I used 75 pounds of pool filter sand in my 75 gallon tank. And it gave me a nice 2 inch depth.

What type of sand are you going to try?

[Mantis_22]

im thinking of buying a 30 gallon soon and using white play sand from lowes. I wonder how it would look and especially how would my catfish and loaches react to it :)

[steeltown]

my loaches love the sand, the pool sand i used came in a natural color but white sand sounds like it would look really nice.

plus, i love the ease of my water changes now compared to when i had gravel.

hope you like yours as much as i like mine:)

[Ace26]

I wouldn't use white sand, I did the first time and using natural brown now(between med to dark brown) at first it was beautiful but after a couple of weeks (with weekly vacuming and water changes) dirt sets in and it was ugly, I had the brown sand for a while now and still looks beautiful..

[steeltown]

good point ace26, never thought of that.

[Mantis_22]

well it depends on your conditions too. It would be bad to use white sand in a planted tank or any tank with High Phosphates. Naturally algae will plague it and cover white areas under the sand. But in a cichlid tank algae has never been a prob for me. Same for waste cleaning. More you clean less gunk that will build up in the sand.

[Ace26]

plants actually are big help when using sand, specially silica sands, the plants absorbs the nutrients in the water and help prevents algae outbreak (specially brown algae, diatoms)

[kdblove_99]

Thanks guys we ended up going to my local pool store and got two 50lb bags this looks to be plenty and was not that hard to clean. Going to give it to her dad for fathers day and all the filtration and heater he will be stoked

[SBee]

I put some black sand in one of my tanks this past weekend.......................and my goldfish died within 24 hours!!!!

[KateA.]

Do you guys gravel siphon with sand and how do you do it? We had some black sand in a tank and we hated it! You could always see gunk on it and it never looked nice. The brown sounds nice, but no on any white substrate. The algae always shows. We never tried hard to find a good way to siphon sand without it going down the sink.

SBee, maybe your fish died because by replacing the substrate you got rid of too much bacteria????

[Mgamer20o0]

i am thinking about using sand and small gravel. has any one done this?

i am going to end up with a planted tank latter on.