Crushed coral is a problem waiting to happen

[Reefscape]

If you are planning on moving too a reef, then yes, i would suggest a change, personaly, as per your plan...what size of tank is this??

 

[thetermite]

120cm x 50cm x 40cm

been planning a reef tank all along...i just wanted to get the tank settled, matured and prepared before i put any corals and anemones. when it gets about 6 months old, i'll start putting in corals, followed by anemones.

 

[jmfolcik]

aragonite?

I bought aragonite, that isn't crushed coral right? I bought one bag of aragonite that was dry and one that had salt water in the thick bag that contained life to help with cycling.

 

[Reefscape]

I bought aragonite, that isn't crushed coral right? I bought one bag of aragonite that was dry and one that had salt water in the thick bag that contained life to help with cycling.

They are both calcium based sands, however, crushed coral is is deal coral skeltons, crushed up to form a substrate...Aragonite reef sand, is an actual sand.

Crushed coral is notorious for collecting detritus and food particles which "can" lead to elevated nitrates. This is due to the large particle size of crushed coral.

 

[thereef]

I would definetly use aragonite based sand of different grains. Buffers ph - natural denitrifier - yada yada yada. But more importantly why not try the Jaubert method. It will definetly drop nitrates to near zero. I did my old 300 reef like that and besides a protien skimmer ( a really good one) I had no filtration what so ever. Ran like that for 3.5 years untill I upgraded to a 600g. My nitrates never went above 5ppm and I only did 10% water changes every month.

 

[93lincoln]

hello everyone i have been wanting to start up a sw tank for awhile now and i got two 5 gallon buckets of crushed coral for free off of craigslist

so now do i use sand or cc
and how do you clean sand cause i used some in a fresh water tank and it got dirty quick and it got on all my plastic plants and filters

so any help will be appreciated

 

[xsdbs]

just curious, what happened to "MAX" who started this thread? I read threads from this person when I first started visiting AC and then never saw anything else from MAX.

 

[dclegern]

i agree with you here. CC has been the way to go for me.
my sand bed grew so much algae and other..... I was about to give. I yanked the sand bed and put in clean/clean/clean CC, and the tank is crystal clear, no algae, and shrooms have perked up.

No complaints here with the CC.

 

[hnlee]

I use CC and yes, we have to clean the cc sometimes. It is better to do an almost empty tank to clean it fast because the nitrate and phoshate will flow when we clean the cc. The advantage of cc is they color wont change like sand does (to black) and more life creatures inside of it if you see carefully (like worm, etc etc, once I had lots of small starfish inside of it and all of them travel around the cc). So, I dont think CC is total useless..
Just change our water 15% and keep the "old" water separately when we want to clean the CC (like I said at above). Remember to use the phophate media!

 

[Robert04]

CRUSHED CORAL ALL DAY AND NIGHT BABY YEAAAA!