switching from crushed coral to sand

[bchbm2022]

Im switching from crushed coral to sand because i was told many times on here that crushed coral was bad because the spaces in between can collect detritus and stuff which cna be hard to get out. I want to switch to sand so I am gonna get an argonite sand or however it is spelled. What I plan to do is put all my fish and live rock into a rubbermaid container while i do this. Now, I'm putting water from my tank into the container. I have a 36 gallon tank with 4 damsels. Should I mix new saltwater for my tank in this process, or should i use the water i take out. MY problem is if I use the water I take out, i would still have to leave enough in the tank for when i put the sand and live rock in. If I took half the water out and put in the rubbermaid container and left half in my tank, would that be ok for my fish? or does anyone have a different approach to switching out my crushed coral for sand. I probably sound confusing and I actually confused my self with what I just wrote, but could someone help me? I really wish I had put sand in from the beginning. By the way, i have a blue devil damsel about 1 inch, a yellowtail about 1 inch maybe a little smaller, and two sergeant major damsel that are around 3 inches just in case that may have to do with how much water i need to take out and put in the rubbermaid container. And while I'm on here, is there any special ways for acclimating macro-aglae? I plan to put some in that fish dont go after eventually to help control nutrients.

[bchbm2022]

oh and also, i do water changes every week and when i cant i do it every week, i do it every two weeks. also, i siphon out the coral as much as i can. I do regular cleaning of the tank every time i do a water change. My nitrates keep going up fast after i do water changes, and i have cut back on feeding. I added purigen to my filter to help with nitrate removal and only after about a couple of weeks it was very discolored and exhausted. Ive done everything i can and still my nitrates go up. Ive lost snails in the past due to this and all i have now is just my 4 damsels and a small feather duster, and aother feather duster that came with my live rock. I am happy to say that i finally stopped my red slime algae problem. I guess my nitrates arent as high as they used to be. I had an ick problem a while back and i tried ick attack. it got rid of the ick but caused a whole bunch of other problems, which is probably where my algae problem came from.

[Reefscape]

Im switching from crushed coral to sand because i was told many times on here that crushed coral was bad because the spaces in between can collect detritus and stuff which cna be hard to get out. I want to switch to sand so I am gonna get an argonite sand or however it is spelled. What I plan to do is put all my fish and live rock into a rubbermaid container while i do this. Now, I'm putting water from my tank into the container. I have a 36 gallon tank with 4 damsels.

<<I would not do it all in one go, i would do a third at a time. Reason for this is so that life from the existing sandbed can seed the new sand>>

Should I mix new saltwater for my tank in this process, or should i use the water i take out. MY problem is if I use the water I take out, i would still have to leave enough in the tank for when i put the sand and live rock in. If I took half the water out and put in the rubbermaid container and left half in my tank, would that be ok for my fish? or does anyone have a different approach to switching out my crushed coral for sand. I probably sound confusing and I actually confused my self with what I just wrote, but could someone help me? I really wish I had put sand in from the beginning. By the way, i have a blue devil damsel about 1 inch, a yellowtail about 1 inch maybe a little smaller, and two sergeant major damsel that are around 3 inches just in case that may have to do with how much water i need to take out and put in the rubbermaid container. And while I'm on here, is there any special ways for acclimating macro-aglae? I plan to put some in that fish dont go after eventually to help control nutrients.


A different approach noted above which will also save you from draining the tank, moving fish out and rock out etc etc....

[bchbm2022]

thanks. i was really unsure about how to go about it.

[bchbm2022]

how would you put the sand in with everything in there? i guess its ok for the water to be cloudy even if the fish are in there.

[Blossom112]

What i did to bring down the dust was soak the new sand in my water change water.then syphoned.
I did the change ,in my opinion i think your plan may be best as everything was so grey looking after my sand setteled and didnt look good .
If you take everything out we got a new dustpan from tthe dollar store and used that to remove the CC got it out way faster the syphoning (slowly)lol

[bchbm2022]

what if i mix in some of the crushed coral tohelp seed the sand? and also add some bigger pieces to it. i also hav eheard some people leave about and inch of crushed coral in and put the sand right over it. i bought my sand btw, its CaribSea Aragamax. Is this a good type of sand or should i take it back and buy something better? It looks just like the sand at the beach i was at in the caribbean so i like it alot.

[kcress]

I too would do the partial way.

Acquire (6) 5 gallon pails.

Make up a 10 gallon water change. Get it aged and temp stabilized.

Rinse your new sand with a garden hose in 5gal pails on the lawn until the water runs clear.

Now when you put in the sand you won't get a huge sand cloud.

Bring in two more 5gal pails.

Pick a side of your tank to change out.

Move all the live rock to the other side.

Now you have unrestricted access to the CC.

Using a siphon hose that is 1/2"-1"ID (inside diameter) start a siphon into one of your pails. Control it with your finger. Distort the hose end by squeezing it if your finger can't plug it. If you distort it into a keyhole shape then your finger can just lay across it.

Start in a corner and VERY agressively siphon the CC into the pail. You want to be sucking as much CC as the siphon can take without clogging. You will see that you can siphon a huge percentage before it chokes. (maybe 80%).

Watch your pail!!! When you've filled the pail change to the second one. When it's full stop. You should have a failrly large cleared area if not fully half the tank bottom.

Do not worry about a few bits of CC on the siphoned side it is a good thing to leave as it will greatly speed the seeding of the new sand.

Because you siphoned two pails out and have two pails of change water ready you should now be able to top your tank back up fully.

Top it back up quickly to just above any exposed live rock or algae because any exposed life will be in a really big hurry to die (a few minutes).

Once you have recovered any exposed stuff you can now take your time and add your new sand in. You can add it any way you want. You will likely find it doesn't matter sand storm wise. But if you do find a better way let us know.

Once your sand is in move back the live rock that was on that side of your tank.

Now patience my precious... Wait several days.. Perhaps a week and then do the same thing for the other side/third/whatever.

One thing I forgot to mention. With your small tank you need to consider the temperatures. If you lob in a third or half the sand and it's cold you will cause a sudden temperature yank. If you washed the sand with a cold garden hose nuke a couple of qts of water and throw it on the sand to bring its temp up a bit to room temp at least.

[bchbm2022]

So I did what I was supposed to do. Everything looked great and my fish seemed fine. Woke up this morning, all of my fish were dead. My feather dusters were fine. So I came to the conclusion that my fish were stressed out. I tested the water, everything at 0 ppm. I checked my salinity, it was around 1.023, so then I thought that maybe some outside chemical got it when using the hose to rinse my sand. But if something did then the algae and my feather dusters would be dead. My damsels have been through a few spikes in ammonia and nitrites and nitrates and were absolutely fine so the only thing I can think of is stress. My one feather duster is nolonger is his tube, but he hasnt been in it for months and was doing just fine. His feathers are a little curled up but he is most definately not dead. MY other little feather duster is doing just great. I wanted to get rid of my damsels so I can have some small peaceful nano fish, but not this way. I am very unhappy. Im defnitely not blaming anybody who gave me advice on how to do this. I did a small portion at a time. I havent had much luck at all with my tank, so now that this happened Im going to act as if I m starting over from the beginning and do everything exactly as it should be done. Im gonna let the tank sit for a few weeks, no fish, and just take care of my feather dusters. Everyday im gonna test the water as usual, do my weekly water changes and siphoning detritus off the sand. The only thing that isnt like starting over again is the tank is cycled. but im still not taking chances. At first I was ready to just pack up my rock and everything, bring them back to the pet store, and then just conver t my tank back to freshwater since Ive had much much better luck with that, but im not going to. Im goign to start over and do things right from the beginning.

[Blossom112]

OMG soo soo sorry ..........................
You couldnt have expected this ,when i did mine i had no fish in tank .
So sorry , dont give up !

[bchbm2022]

thanks. i was in a horrible mood this morning but when I noticed that my feather dusters were still alive it was like a ray of hope or something. Im not gonna give up because you learn through mistakes, even if they can be big mistakes. I plan on getting some a firefish, 2 clowns, and maybe another yellowtail damsel because the one i had was nowhere near aggressive. I eventually want to get a sand sifting sea star, but not for a while. I want to just get things back on track first. Maybe only just get some snails because with the sun shining through my window right on my tank, the algae is growing a little too much. Its all over my rocks and it caught some of the dust from the crushed coral and sand so everything is white right now.

[kcress]

That is really very odd.. For starters most invertebrates are far more susceptible to poisoning than fish.

Stress is not what killed your fish. Fish live life in the fast lane and cope with stress fairly well. Stress with fish 99% of the time expresses itself as disease that shows up in a day or two, NOT massive death over night.

Hose washing of sand is not a problem either. Very little water ends up actually going into the tank with washed sand.

When I started with marine fish before I knew what was happening I phrenically siphoned out 80% of my crushed coral every weekend and ran hundreds of gallons of hose water thru it trying to get rid of the mat algae plague. This never bothered the fish in the least.


What will kill fish like that is a poison that is vertebrate oriented or more likely a huge sudden temperature swing.

Tell us how you proceeded.

BTW sorry for your losses.

[bchbm2022]

I decided to go ahead and put the rest of the sand in. I mixed in some crushed coral tohelp seed the sand and also bought live sand to mix in. Not really sure about how live the live sand at petsmart was but i gave it a try. Im basically starting from scratch now. Once things gets settled, i will try to post pictures and my progress on my tank. that way i can have some criticizm on what I am doing and what i need to do. I really dont think it was poison because i rinsed the hell out of the sand before i put it in and drained as much of the water from the sand as i could, also it was a very hot sunny day so i let the sand heat up in the sun for a while before placing it in the tank so it wouldnt cause a tempurature drop. I siphoned coral out, then allowed the little bit of cloudiness to settle, then I put the new sand in and moved my rock back. I cleaned the filter and replaced water i took out with new water i mixed about 6 days before, which had matching water tempurature, ph, and salinity. Today i repeated the process. I left a layer of crushed coral on the bottom and i mixed some in as well. Im gonna wait until I get back from my vacation to get new fish or anthing else. The only thing Im going to do is buy a better protein skimmer because my prism skimmer is not good. I hope that within a year from now I will have a very nice established system that I woud be happy to show off.

[kcress]

Thanks for the run down.. I can't see any procedural problem. Seems like you did a thoughtful, considered change.

I was in my local crummy LFS and was thinking maybe you accidentally put in fresh water instead of saltwater during all the commotion but it sounds like you had that dialed in just fine.

Like I said, I had a 55g and I would suck out 35~40 gallons so the fish practically had to lay on their sides. Then hours later heaved a bunch of hosed off sand back in. Never had an issue with the fish, or the anomie's, shrimp or, snails. Probably did this 35 times before terminal exhaustion got to me and I decided to hell with it. Four weeks later the truth unveiled itself.

I am really baffled by this.

How many fish did you have?

[bchbm2022]

I had 4 damsels, I had five originally but the one got beat up by the others. I had these from the beginning from when I used them to cycle my tank and they survived a bad case of ick when my clownfish didnt, which probably came in with my clownfish from petco. Im definateyl not buying from them anymore because everytime I walk in there to get dog food, i look at their fish and they all have ick or something else. Like I said I had planned on getting rid of them to get some small fish, but i didnt want them to go that way. I had lost a fish in my freshwater tank a while back for only just moving a decoration around, but then it was also really old.

[bchbm2022]

Ok so i have finished with the sand and it settled pretty fast. I have my live rock back in place and got most of the dust off them, but i did have some algae that caught a lot so i couldnt get it all off. Im definately not puttin fish in yet, but I need help with a stocking list. I want to get a clown fish, a firefish, and a royal gramma. Would I be able to get a sand sifting fish also and can anyone give me an idea for one? Also, i want to get like 10 hermits and 10 snails, and a sandsifting starfish. I also want to get a cleaner shrimp but I dont know if the size of my tank would allow. Also, I love feather dusters and I literally lost the other one, i dont know where it is. Would I be able to get like 2 of these as well? I would really apreciate it if someone could give me an idea for a list. Any ideas for detritus eating things would be helpful as well. I also want to add some macroalgae. Thanx. Oh and by the way, again my tank is a 36 gallon, and i have a rena fisltar xp1 filter, prism skimmer which will get replaced because it is worthless, and compact flourescent lighting with 1 dual 65 watt 6,700 k/10,000 k, and one dual 420/460 actinic for any lighting requirements. Once things get settled im gonna start a new thread with pics of my progress.