My 29G is bare bottom.. I have about 40lbs of old Caribsea sand that I rinsed really well, then cleaned out things like urchin spines, and spent 2 days baking the sand in the oven one cookie sheet worth at a time to dry it out. lol. Lot of work for a little sand. That is what I will be using on my 55G tank. IMO dead sand is great sand to start with.. there is no need for live sand but if you can get 1 cup out of a GOOD sand bed that will help. With that Dr. Tim's you have it should make your rock and sand into good live stuff in no time. Right now on my 75G I would call my deep sand bed a bad sand bed and I am slowly siphoning out sand with each water change to go from a 5" sand bed down to a 2" sand bed because right now the bottom 2" are all black, which is bad. I will reuse the sand I take out and put it in my 55G after I rinse it good and bake it. One of my many mistakes I have made in this hobby.... jumped on the deep sand bed bandwagon but I didn't make mine correctly and after a few years it went bad. I used sugar fine sand when I should have mixed a lot of courser types in with it.
