any tricks to removing sand bed without removing much water??

[spamreefnew]

and will my engineer gobby be ok if i do remove said sand??

[lucidheights]

just syphon out the sand into a bucket then pour the water back in once the sand settles

[spamreefnew]

guess that would work ,,,duh on me :)

[hollister]

Why do you want to remove the sand?

[albano]

just syphon out the sand into a bucket then pour the water back in once the sand settles
IMO, depending how old and dirty the sand is, it might be better to NOT add that water back into tank!

[my40breeder]

place a filter sock in the sump and siphon into it. you will lose no water, but you will have to stop several times to dump out the sand

[Anemone]

I used a soft plastic cup (about 16 oz) to scoop out most of the 6" sand bed in my 80 gallon tank. Soft plastic is important, as you can squeeze it to hold on and if will flatten a bit when it scrapes along the bottom of the tank. Scooping with cup like this works well because when the cup is full of sand, there is very little water taken out.

It will create a bit of a sand storm, and you will need to do some siphoning at the end to clean up the leftovers, but all-in-all, very little water is lost via this technique.

Also, I wouldn't remove the entire sandbed at once. Depending upon your setup, your other filtration may or may not be able to handle the loss of so much surface area, plus you'll be adding organics to the water column by disturbing the sandbed. So, IMO, it's best to leave at least half the sandbed intact (I did mine in thirds) to allow the remaining sandbed to handle the increase in organics as well as allow the remaining filtration areas to increase their bacterial population.

FWIW,
Kevin