siphoning sandbed

[an411]

I was trying to look up in the search info on siphoning the sandbed but was unsucessful. I know there are mixed reviews on the subject but was wondering what people though about siphoning a 2 inch deep sandbed.

[Randy Holmes-Farley]

Are you talking about cleaning it or removing it by siphon?


What size sand grains?

[an411]

cleaning it I am not sure the grain size. but I am getting a little cyano on my sandbed and was thinking that i should siphon it out wasnt sure if its an issue disturbing the sandbed

[BigJay]

I just lightly swish the gravel vac over the top of the sand without disturbing it too much. That way I get the fish poop, uneaten food, pockets of cyano, and discarded shrimp molts without removing much sand.

Someone tell me if I'm doing it wrong.

[m2434]

I use an airline tube once and a while and just lightly go over the surface. I try not to touch the sand, just hold the tube a few mm above the sand. The less you disturb the sand the better IMO, but I do find occasional cleaning to be useful.

[JamesJR]

I used to remove sediment from the first 1/2 inch or so a few times a year. My experience is that the sand can tend to clump together over time, especially with lots of fish but then again mine was only about 2 inches deep.

[an411]

Yeah I am going to do the surface with trying not to disturb the sand bed to much I will let you guys know how i make out

[Randy Holmes-Farley]

I do not ever clean any of my sand beds, but that doesn't mean that I couldn't somehow or wouldn't be better of if I did. :)

[bhanson]

I tend to clean my sandbed in the display tank some, usually reluctantly. If I leave the DSB in the refugium alone would there be less potential danger cleaning the sandbed in the display tank?

Also, do any of you clean the DSB in refugiums? I tend to get a lot of junk built up and would like to get rid of some of it.

[Randy Holmes-Farley]

[welcome]

I don't clean the sand beds in my refugia, which have been around for many years, because they are deep under thick Caulerpa racemosa and would be hard to clean, but they are visibly covered with grey stuff that might be best exported somehow.

[DaveMorris]

I only clean my sandbed, both in my 300g display as well as my 60g refugium, with the use of conchs, trochus, nassarious, and nerite snails. I think it is a bad idea to do any vacuuming in a tank. Use the critters that God made to clean your tank for you.

[acrylic_300]

My tank is 8 foot long...it seems impossible to not have dead spots in the corners. I vacuum the sand out of the corners into a bucket then pour the sloppy water off of it...swirl the sand around a few times before I do it.

Getting it back into the tank is the tricky part.

[Adamc1303]

I have tank that is 48" long and 30" deep. Not your average depth. My sand bed is very clean, all you need to do is make sure you have ALLOT of flow so nothing can settle anywhere. No dead spots.

[mhaith]

Nothing like a good turkey baster blasting to feed the corals and export the cloud into the overflows and into the filter socks I install only for that event.
Been blasting the rocks and the sand for over a decade in different tanks.
My corals seem to love it with great PE and growth.

[The0wn4g3]

To clean or not to clean really depends on your tank set-up and the way you want your sandbed to function (IMO).

While I was doing tank maintenance, we would syphon as much of the sand out as we could. We would then pour out the water, fill the bucket with tap water, swirl and pour, fill, swirl, pour repeat... until it was clean. This method worked fine as the clients didn't care whether the sandbed was "alive" or not. In removing and cleaning the sand (usually twice a month) we were basically treating the tank as if it were bare bottom.

On the other hand, we had some customers that maintained their own tanks that utilized DSB's and shallow sanbeds. Sometimes they had good luck and didn't have to ever clean the sand, and sometimes no matter what they did they still ended up cleaning it.

Personally, I've always found it easier to clean the sandbed as I depend on the liverock, skimmer, micron socks, etc for filtration. There was a short spell in which I didn't need to clean my sandbed, and that was right after I installed a DSB in my refugium. But, after a few months, the sand in the DSB was so nasty I ended up removing it. I'm running my tank BB so I don't have to worry about sand :)

[surge19us]

Get a 1/2" rigid tube at your LFS and some flex tube. Start a siphon and just get near the spots you want to clean gets very little sand disturbance as opposed to a gravel vac. Also only pulls off maybe the top few grains of sand and if you slip only disturbs a very small area.