Changing Substate

[Skywalker71]

I currently have crushed coral in my tank and have been wanting to change it to live sand, but I'm afraid of the effects it could have on my water parameters. I am curious if it is even possible to do this? Any input would help (by the way, just some tank backgroud-it is a 40g and has been running a little over 2 years). Thanks in advance.

 

[Toddrtrex]

Long story short -- I did something similar to my 58 about 3 weeks ago. (( I also replaced all the rock )) Finished on a Sunday night, did a full battery of tests on a Tuesday, and all numbers were spot on.

During the change over I put the old live rock and all livestock into rubbermaid bins, they stayed there until that Monday when I put the fish, anemone and some SPS frags back into the tank.

Here is the thread about it.
http://reefcentral.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=1233581

 

[wizzbane15]

the only thing you whave to worry about is all of the "stuff" that has accumulated in the substrate. Take it out and aal of the detrius and"stuff" gets released. The best thing I have heard of is taking the substrate out and skimming the water real heavy and maybe even throwing some carbon in too to scrub the water ASAP. I would do this before I added the LS in. LS is gonna have a lot of die off to since it has been bagged up for who knows how long.

 

[tperk9784]

We did this to a friends tank a couple months ago. We pulle dout all the rock and put them in rubbermaid tubs, siphoned off all the water and put in the tubs and garbage cans. used a dustpan to scoop out all the crushed coral wet vacced the little bits we couldn't scoop up.

then we dumped in all the new sand did some basic rockscaping and once most of the rock as back in the tank started replacing the water. this made for hardly any clouding.

We let the tank sit for a couple hours and started replacing corals and fish.

never saw a change in parameters once.