Deep sand bed is years expired. Time to remove. Ideas?

robertloop

robertloop

Member
Hello reef peeps,

So.. As the title states, my sand bed is way, way, over aged. Finally I am getting big signs of this. I have had the same 4" ish sand bed in my main display for about 5 years. (120 gallons.)

Its time for it to go. My plan is to siphon out the sand over the course of a month. Sections at a time till I have a bare bottom tank.

Anybody have direct experience with this? All opinions are welcome unless I disagree with you. :fun2: haha
 
I would think it's be a whole lot safer to do it all at once and have at least a 50% water change ready to go. I think if it were me I'd be set up to do 25% water changes every 4 hours for 16 hours.

By removing part at a time you're exposing things that I don't think you want exposed.
 
Coudln't you just shut the sump off and isolate it from the display and remove the whole lot at once? Then replace all the sump water?
 
I was in the same place you are now about five years ago. I tried siphoning it out in sections. The process was hard on the corals. I don't know if it was the sulfides that process released or the loss in filtration capacity was I lot a few. Fortunately nothing that was irreplaceable died.

My suggestion is that you bring three remote deep sand beds online to take up the load. When they get going good, in about three months, start siphoning the sand out of the tank.

I kept mine and rinsed it. I had a pretty bad algae outbreak but nothing more than you'd see with new sand.
 
I did this my self. I did a little at a time over a few months. That way the tank has a chance to recover before the next amount is taken out. I removed a few pounds each week while doing a water change. Good luck and take it slow.
 
Assuming your tank is crammed full as you'd expect after five years, I'd...

  1. Setup the 3+ RDSBs on the display tank. After about a month you should see an improvement in the water quality.
  2. Setup a temp holding tank with a carbon media reactor and plenty of circulation. A good skimmer would be helpful too.
  3. Plumb (temporary Q&D plumbing) the RDSBs into the holding tank and tune up your display tank skimmer
  4. Transfer the live rock and livestock into the holding tank
  5. Siphon about 50% of your tank water into storage, 50g barrels work well. Drain the rest of the water out.
  6. The tank is empty now. Remove the in-tank DSB
  7. Fill the display tank half full with new water.
  8. Pump the saved water in.
  9. Move the live rock and livestock back into the display tank.
  10. Plumb the RDSBs back into the display tank
  11. Take the temp tank down
To minimize die off don't expose the live rock to air. When your moving the livetock do not expose it to air. Submerge a bucket into the display tank. Put the live rock in the submerged bucket. Submerge the bucket in the temp tank. Take the live rock out.
 
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I removed my DSB a year ago. All I did was scooped out a cup of sand from the surface area during water changes. And I did 35-40% of water change at a time. It took me about or more than 3 months to get rid of all sand. I removed the sand as slow as I can, and at least my sps was not looked stressed at that time.
 
At 5 years, I'd just throw the sand away. You can rinse it if you really want, but it's going to take about 1000 gallons of water.

I like both Brian's method and the one cup at a time method. I don't think there's any risk in removing one cupful at a time. Your system should be able to handle anything that comes out of that.
 
Thanks for all the good ideas. I may just lower a container of DSB in the sump and let it bake for a month. Then siphon/scoop the sand in increments from the display. I run a CA reactor and like the "buffer" a DSB offers. I dont "think" the sand bed in the main display is deep enough to harbor a significant amount of hydrogen sulfide so I will go slow and reload the carbon/rust reactor.
 
Hey Karen

I re-used the sand from my 120 in 170. I re-used it again in my 300.

I built a strainer box with screen door screen on it. I used it to rinse the sand thoroughly in fresh water. I was able to reclaim about 2/3 the original sand volume. The rest rinsed away onto my lawn.

Did it work?

I've rinsed 1/4 to 1/3 of my remote deep sand beds a couple times. Each time there was an initial drop in water clarity (bacteria bloom) followed by an overall improvement coral color and PE.

This is the 2nd time I've done a 100% rinse and tank restart. Both times I had a pest algae problem of some sort. Of course that seems to happen with new sand too so I guess you can say it worked well.
 
IME - a cup at a time is a good way to kill everything. I tried this with my 120. It released a lot of sufides into the tank and killed several corals.
 
Then wouldn't that mean that you REALLY want to avoid any strategy that involves removing part of the sand bed at a time at all costs?

Avoid sand altogether, solves the problem entirely :)

Brian Prestwood said:
IME - a cup at a time is a good way to kill everything. I tried this with my 120. It released a lot of sufides into the tank and killed several corals.
Click to expand...
 
Hey Ron

With the livestock in the tank I agree that removing a bit of the expired DSB at a time probably just as bad as removing it all at once.

If it was newer and shallower I'd say siphon a bit out at a time. I did that with my one year old in-tank 2" sand bed.

In this case, an expired in-tank DSB, I don't know of any way to leave the livestock in the tank and remove the DSB, parts or whole, w/o exposing the livestock to the sulfides trapped in the sand and/or the nutrient spike from the dying anaerobic bacteria.

As for omitting DSBs entirely, I still think a renewable bio-filter is required. The expired in-tank DSB problem can be avoided. Contrary to Shimek's advice, Fenner suggests sand-siphoning a small portion of in-tank DSBs periodically. I think Shimek got that one wrong.

My recommendation is to set up 3 or more DSBs in a bucket. This guarantees leakage free DSB maintenance. This allows you to completely remove the detritus as well as the bacteria on a portion of the DSB with no risk of sulfide leakage.

Carbon dosing and a good skimmer appears to turn the water column into a renewable bio-filter. I've seen my PO4 go up quickly when I stopped my carbon dosing then come back down quickly when I restarted it.
 
The anerobic bacteria die off has my attention. I do have a fairly decent skimmer for the
tank volume. I like all the different views here. It looks like there is not a perfect solution for this problem but with all this information I can tailor a strategy an minimize loss if not, eliminate coral loss.
 
Brian Prestwood said:
As for omitting DSBs entirely, I still think a renewable bio-filter is required. The expired in-tank DSB problem can be avoided. Contrary to Shimek's advice, Fenner suggests sand-siphoning a small portion of in-tank DSBs periodically. I think Shimek got that one wrong.
Click to expand...

I use the RC Tanks of the Month as a sounding board for my questioning of my own logic. Here's my analysis:

http://reefkeeping.com/joomla/index.php/current-issue/article/78-tank-of-the-month

No use of the word "sand" in the article. Some pictures show some sand in the display tank.

http://reefkeeping.com/joomla/index.php/current-issue/article/76-tank-of-the-month

One small tank mentions some aesthetic sand. No mention of deep sand beds.

http://reefkeeping.com/joomla/index.php/current-issue/article/75-tank-of-the-month

No instance of "sand" or "dsb" in the article. Mentions macroalgae in the fuge.

Poletti:
http://reefkeeping.com/joomla/index.php/current-issue/article/58-tank-of-the-month

5 lbs of sand.

Sanjay:

http://reefkeeping.com/joomla/index.php/current-issue/article/66-tank-of-the-month

"Even though its not very deep, it provides a large area for additional bacteria to colonize and areas for biodiversity to potentially grow. Additionally, I knew I was going to be adding fish such as wrasses (some of which bury into the sand to sleep) and bottom dwelling gobies that also prefer a sandy bottom. While the sand is fine grained, it does tend to blow around a bit when disturbed but quickly settles. Initially, when the pumps were turned on, the sand got moved around by the water flow and created several areas of bare bottom. These areas were covered with coarse sand and coral rubble which has the added benefit of creating a rubble zone in the tank further adding to the potential for bio diversity and placement of bottom dwelling corals that prefer rubble zones to sand."

Awesome tank with huge basement support system:
http://reefkeeping.com/joomla/index.php/current-issue/article/71-tank-of-the-month

No mention of sand.

In conclusion, I'm not sure how you can say it's "required." I did skim through all of the articles, especially on filtration. I saw no mention of vodka or carbon dosing, either. Note these aren't cherry picked, they are just the ones I clicked on.

http://reefkeeping.com/joomla/totm-list

For anyone who hasn't read them, they're the best I know of to learn about high end system design.
 
If you're not convinced that they get toxic, just stir one up that's a year old and see what lives and what dies. Drop a powerhead into one and you can lose everything. Imagine everything that builds up in them. That dead piece of silverside that didn't get eaten and rotted in there and has slowly been leaching out nastiness for months. Mysis shrimp that are half eaten. Fish poo that's settled in for years. The bacteria can't consume it all.

I don't think it's just a matter of them expiring because of a bacteria load. I'd bet they just get supersaturated with nasty stuff and become toxic.

I believe that Brian is 100% right that removable DSB's are beneficial, by the way. It makes perfect sense and is a great implementation and very safe. I just don't think they're REQUIRED.
 
Well, last April, I had my 11 years old and dirty sand bed removed in one shot. I was so happy to see so much yucky stuff vacuumed out of my tank. And I was sure my tank was going to be greatly improved. You know what -- I was so wrong. I had algae outbreak and then cyano attack all over my tank. It took me more than 6 months of hard work to get rid of most of them. In fact, I still have some very minute negligible cyano if I really look for it.
I now only have half an inch of large grain sand just for look. My lfs advised me to add sand or remove sand slowly, a small area at a time. I may follow his advice next time.
 
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