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Need advice on removing stablish sandbed out

I think im going to take the veterans advices and go with the safe route, syphoning slowly on every water change.. Besides, i dont think i can drain the tank and removed all the corals/fishes without harming it.

Just curious, how many of you are BB and how many have sand?
 
I prefer a shallow sand bed myself. I like to keep it stired with water changes, all that bateria growing in DSB's just scare me.
 
Bb at home. Many tanks with sand. I agree with Levi though, when I do sand beds I like them to be on the shallower side and stirred up with diamond gobies and manually during water changes
 
LeviT said:
I prefer a shallow sand bed myself. I like to keep it stired with water changes, all that bateria growing in DSB's just scare me.
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I have a shallow sand 1-2 inches. but its the coarse ones, the same sand as Ian. i found it to be a Detritus trap, i have tons of them under it.
 
Coral reefer said:
Bb at home. Many tanks with sand. I agree with Levi though, when I do sand beds I like them to be on the shallower side and stirred up with diamond gobies and manually during water changes
Click to expand...

any preference? BB or sand? why?
 
I have a quite deep sandbed in my 55 G display tank. It's more than 5 inches deep in spots. For most of the tank's life I had Engineer gobies which moved the sand a lot. I also, perhaps in ignorance, have done light siphon vacuuming of the sand to clear detritus. I haven't been concerned about it because it doesn't result in much material entering the tank water column. It sounds that maybe I shouldn't be moving the sand at all.

I currently have only a hang on back filter for this tank. I do rinse the sponge out in my waste water with each water change. I have had occasional PO4 spikes in this tank. I have mostly kept them under control with Phosguard. Generally I have attributed the spikes to dead snails. Since the last large snail died I haven't had any more spikes. I also use quite a bit of well rinsed carbon in the HOB filter. I change tthe carbon every other month. I only change the phosguard when I see an increase in PO4. (indicating exhaustion of the media)

Mike
 
I like the look of sand, as long as it's nice and clean, which to me means no algea growing on it, and no detritus settling on it. Personally I find sand to be a little bit more work to maintain, and if you fall behind on maintenance it can get really dirty and be a problem. That's why I go bb at home. The look of bb doesn't bother me and it's easier, so that's why I do it. Nowhere for detritus to hide.
 
I have relatively coarse 1" shallow sand bed.
I actually think it is a bit of a pain and would prefer BB for maintenance.
But I personally just don't like the look of a flat bare bottom, so sand it is.

I have really considered a mostly-live-rock like bottom though.
Basically, make randomly shaped lumpy tiles of cement + aragonite + rock rubble,
with a bit of sand in between.
The idea being that you get most of the benefits of BB, but it is not a flat slab.

Amusingly story though:
I had a big Alk problem early on, and it turned the top 1/4" of my entire sand bed nearly to concrete.
I though about leaving it that way for a while. An interesting alternative to BB. :)
 
I like DSB's because they are zero day to day maintenance, and contribute so much to the tank's overall stability and nutrient processing ability.
 
to add to the discussion - I also did the "remove some at each water change" method...I think I actually removed a 6" x 6" area each change, that allowed me to remove about 5G of water, and I removed this amount once or twice a week. Then, just a small waterchange and all set.

Actually, then I rinsed the sand, dropped it in some acid to remove bound junk, rinsed again, and eventually replaced some of the sand bed. I went from a 3" sandbed to about a 1.5" bed, this was on my 180 gallon tank. I had no fish or coral losses with this method.
 
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