Sand

B

BELLUM

AC Members
Nov 15, 2005
178
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Chicago
I have been in the hobby for a while but always went with gravel, not sand.
Anyway, now i am setting up a tank for a friend of mine who wants sand. I told him i know nothing about it. So i thought i would ask the nice and kind people here for some help.

The sand setup is for a 29gallon eclipse tank. He has not made his mind up about what fish he wants.

So give it to me. What do i need to know? What are the problems with sand?
Can you use a undergravel filter with it, no right?

Thanks you.
 
Undergravel filters won't work, unless the sand is a very large grain size. It is harder to vacuum then gravel, so it makes maintenance a bit tougher.
 
Vacuming can be made just as easy as gravel by swirling the vacum over the sand to stir up waste. This instead of shoving the vacum into the substrate like we would if it was gravel. I have some black tahitian sand in my 30gal and it looks great.
 
Sand is the only thing I will ever use. There is no need for UGF as the waste particles don't get under the surface. Especially with an eclipse system--no other filtering is needed---in my opinion it looks far better than gravel as well.-------------YAY SAND
 
NIMFT. Sand, at any significant depth, is a time bomb potentially equal to unmaintained UG filters. Been there, done that, but never again unless absolutely required by the fish being kept. I do not enjoy shooting myself in the foot.
 
RTR said:
NIMFT. Sand, at any significant depth, is a time bomb potentially equal to unmaintained UG filters. Been there, done that, but never again unless absolutely required by the fish being kept. I do not enjoy shooting myself in the foot.
Click to expand...

What do you mean by this?
 
Thank you everyone.
 
What RTR mean is that sand can potentially hold colonies of anaerobic bacteria which realese dangerous gases in the water. This can also happen in a long time set UGF which is not cleaned (2-3 years prehaps)

This can be avoided by stirring tha sand from time to time. When I vaccum my sand, I use the syphon to stir the sand. It get disturbed, but settles rapidly. In my case, I have two stingrays that keep stirring the sand all day long, so they mostly do the work for me.

If you choose sand, consider this:

- Gravel hides poop, sand shows it. If you don't clean ti regularly, you'll have a lot of poo on top. This is good, since hidden wastes can be problematic in the long term.

- When vaccuming, don't push the syphon all the way down. You'll suck a lot of sand.

- Don't use UGF. Sand will compact easily and will clog the plates.

- Before adding it to the tank, rinse it and keep it wet. If you pour it dry, you'll have a lot of floating sand. After filling the tank, let it settle for 2 days before turning on the filters. Sand can damage your filter(s) propellers.

Don't be scared. It sounds like a lot of problems, but not. Sand looks greatly better than gravel (IMHO), and is specially good if you plan on getting fish that like to borrow in the bottom.
 
I use to have sand in all my tanks. I got rid of all of it though.
I had several problems with sand.

-It made my filters dirtier.
-It got into my household plumbing, causing clogs.
-It harbored anarobic bacteria. When this happened the sand turned black in some spots and smelled like sulfur when it got disturbed.

-The main reason why I got rid of Sand was because it was a breeding ground for parasites. Anti-parasite treatments can't penetrate the parasite infested sandbeds. If you have loaches or other bottom dwelling fish that sleep on the sand, you can guess what happened to them. Massive outbreak.
 
Thank You

I was going to get play sand from Home Depot. I was also wondering if i could find black sand from somewhere and if it is safe?
 
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