Does Turface affect any water parameters?

abcdefghi

abcdefghi

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Jun 6, 2007
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In about a months time I am moving into my new house, and when I move I plan to dump my play sand substrate in favor of something heavier. I looked at Eco-Complete, but to be honest for the price I would rather just stick with the play sand and cleaning my filter out more often.

So I searched on here and found out about Turface, but in all my searching I cannot find out if it has any effect on water parameters. At my new house we will have well water, I have no idea yet on the pH/GH/KH etc but am hoping its close to the same I am on now (also well water).

Does Turface cause any change to these? how quickly does it clear up after putting it in the tank? I plan to drain water into a tote, put fish in there, plants and filters in another, empty sand, rinse tank, move tank (stand etc) then add rinsed Turface and fill.

Thanks.
 
Anybody? I am moving my tank in about a week or so and want to change substrate then.

Also, how heavy is turface? my main reason for switching out from play sand is that my cory cats kick it up like crazy and its always in my filter. I want something that's not going to get sucked up as easily. It sounds like turface is pretty fine/light?
 
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Check the substrate forum in Aquatic plant central. But if it is the same as Soil master select then no it is inert. If it like Schultz aquasoil it may affect your PH or spike your ammonia. Can't remember exactly. Check APC.
 
I use SMS in a few tanks (pretty much the same stuff, granular fired montmorillonite clay). It is pretty inert, but the reason people use it is that it has a high CEC (cation exchange capacity). When you first add it, it acts like a sponge, pulling all sorts of ions out of the water column (macros and trace elements). For this reason, my stem plants and floating plants really looked pretty poor for the first month or so since everything they needed to grow was being sucked out of the water column into the substrate. If you do some searching, you can find some methods people use to kind of "prime" it before adding it to the tank to minimize this occurrence. It is fairly light, but it settles better than sand does. I've never had any issue with it getting kicked up into the filter, although you have to be careful vacuuming it because it is possible to suck it right out of the tank.
 
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