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Cleaning Sand... Your Opinion

J

Jonjonmolina333

So I asked this question because recently injured my yellow coris wrasse while cleaning the sand. i probed the sand as i was cleaning to make sure i would not get him. But he decided to be an execellent player of hide and seek and stayed near his rock when I poked before I passed the vacumn. So I put the vacumn head in the sand near the rock apparently trapping him in between. It wasn't much pressure but with his moving sadly he lost some scales. He's recovering now, do a lot better its been two weeks and where he lost his scales he has new ones kind of white but starting to get the yellow color again.

So this made me think about cleaning sand/ substrate. I have black and white aragonite sand less than 2 inches which I clean about every two months or little less. I did research on the web and of course there is tons of information.

So I would like to see what you think about cleaning sand. I know you need to consider deep sand beds and the type of sand and the bio load. What are your methods? Do you even clean? Advice for anyone. Or anything you want to add.
 
NikkiT

NikkiT

I don't clean my sand bed. But Ethan at AO, who helps us with maintaining our tank, does. The amount of nastyness that comes out of the sand bed is impressive. The water in the bucket is a nice yucky toffee color when he is done.
He uses a vacuum syphon.
Our sand bed is shallow in some places and deep in others (we have pistol shrimp).
Our sand bed is fiji pink sand.
Our bioload for the size of our system is low.
 
B

BuGG

I used to vacuum siphon the sand on our old 34 gal. No matter how much water change I did, the nitrates won't go down. So a couple of LFS advised us to clean sections of the sand during our water change. It wasn't too deep. Probably less than 2 inches all around. I probably did that every month for 3 months and saw nitrate levels go down. Now that I think about it, I may have too much bioload for the size of the tank and most of the food and fish poo settled down on the sand.

Is there a reason why you have to clean the sand? I know others say don't touch the sandbed or trapped gasses or bacteria(?) could poison the fish.
 
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