water changes with sand

k3vinliu

k3vinliu

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Oct 15, 2006
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hey everyone, im thinking about adding sand to my con breeding tank to make it look more appealing. right now its bare bottom, so my question is how one deals with sand regarding water changes and maintenance. sorry if it sounds like such an easy question to answer, but i never dealt with sand before. thanks! :)
 
I'm dealing with sand for the first time in my 150, and let me tell you. I prefer it over gravel. The obvious difference is that fish wastes settle into the gravel, giving the illusion of a cleaner tank, but come vacuum time, we find differently. With sand, fish wastes settle on top, letting you know exactly what state your tank is in. So if you like a clean tank, sand is for you. If you like the illusion of a clean tank, stay away. If you are concerned about sand loss through vacuuming, don't. I lose more gravel than sand.

Aside from the obvious, sand has disadvantages by the score. When first adding sand, it produces silt, which quickly bungs up your bio filters. When I cleaned mine after filtering out the silt, it weighed about 8 pounds. Also, sand doesn't support beneficial bacterial cultures like gravel does, which means you need ample decorations to provide some solid surface area. Also I've heard mention of anaerobic bacterium growing in deeper sands which can be harmful to fish.

One other downfall to sand, that I've found in my own experience is that it tends to stick to the slimecoat on scaleless fish, which is particularly disconcerting if you keep lazy bottom feeders like my SA red tail.
 
The biggest thing I've found when working with sand is to turn off your filter when you add the new water, this gives the sand time to settle and keeps you from getting too much in your filter and destroying the propeller..
 
thanks for all the advice shocker and mudfrog. its only for my breeding tank for cons, so i shouldn't have to worry about any scaleless fish.
 
i just spoke with an lfs worker today that accually knows what he is talking about
and he said you will get nitros pockets and you just move the sand around to release them
and to put it in a tank with water in it sink the bag of sand then cut the bag like a capital "I" a line with a line on both ends an kind of massage it out of the bag so it doesnt float around
 
Just hover your gravel vac over the sand to stir up the detritus, and suck it up in the gravel vac. It's easy, and you never have to do deep gravel vacs because the detritus stays on top. Stirring the sand with your fingers during your water changes will prevent gas bubbles from building up, but your cons will probably dig so much in the sand it won't matter anyway. A really cheap option is to buy a bag of pool filter sand from a pool supply store. It's about 10 bucks for a 50 pound bag. It won't raise your pH like aragonite or Caribsea's Cichlid Sand, and the grains are large and heavy enough so that it doesn't get sucked into your filter. Also, the bag I bought didn't really require that much rinsing, and it didn't cloud my water. :)
 
I used play sand for almost 2 years. I would the end of the net and stir up the sand. Then I would use the python and go on teh top of the sand an vacuum. It works great. I just got my new set up running and using pool filter sand, I also ordered MT snails from http://www.rainbowsnails.com/ They are suppose to help move the sand around. I will still do it myself as well.
 
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i have sand in my freshwater 180 litre tank. i do a 25 litre water change every 2 weeks and it stays clean easily
 
i think i am going to buy a 20g and move my 10g fish over and then start a sand substrate tank in there for my cons to breed. i will post pics as soon as i am done. its going to be blue and white sand that i got from ikea. will that work ok? the sand is for decor use, but i want to use it in water.
 
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