I have my aquarium set up with a piece of driftwood, rocks and 6 fish. How do I go about changing the gravel to sand or is it even possible? Never even thought about it until I started seeing the pics on here and I really think it looks awesome. Also I am planning on live plants.
Changing from gravel to sand?
- Thread starter verna2197
- Start date
Honestly, I'd think twice about that. First, gravel is WAY easier to clean (I've got two gravel FW and two sand SW, so I know what I'm talking about here). Second, the vast majority of aquatic plants don't care about your substrate. They get their nutrition from the water and light, not from dirt. Yes, sand looks cool, but it's a PITA.
I have sand in all of my tanks, and I will never go back to gravel. I have never had problems with keeping my sand clean. As long as you have enough water flow through your tank, you should have minimal problems.
Sent from my PC36100 using MonsterAquariaNetwork App
Actually, sand tends to look diritier simply because it holds the waste on the surface of the substrate where as gravel allows the waste to work it's way down into the substrate so the surface looks cleaner but the underlayers are more full of waste. Cleaning the substrate is made easier by this because you need only vacuum across the surface of the sand to remove waste rather than vacumming into the gravel to remove that same waste. As Manafel pointed out, you can easily use current/flow wihtin the tank to manage where waste settles (this is true of either substrate, btw) to minimize the appearance of waste on the substrate.
they're both ftw. Sometimes I prefer the quickness of cleaning sand. Lately I've just been stirring up the gunk that settles so my filter grabs it, then just WC with a garden hose. It's also very enjoyable to jab the siphon into the gravel and see all of the nastiness come out. But there's no argument that you need sand to make a tank look natural.
Glad you found a method you like. What method are you using?
Glad you found a method you like. What method are you using?
With play sand and decent flow, the sand always looks clean. the crud tends to gather under decor like snow drifts
I have a freshwater store with about 300 pounds of sand. We focus a lot on plants and I'll tell you, when you're planting 1000 stems, you want something that'll hold them down. gravel is a pain for anchoring stems and as long as you do light sweeps with your siphon, the detritus is easily lifted from sand
