sand bed cleaning y or no

C

cubow78

New member
i have a 4 inch deep sand bed im trying to bring down my nitrates they are very high . should i use a vacum on the sand it is in a reef tank all i have is just some soft coral well just shrooms and xena wanting to get nitrates down befor i put sps and lps in the tank
 
I have been vacuuming my sand recently with no spike in nitartes or ammonia. I begin the process after talking with my LFS owner who has a display tank in his store that he vacuums.

The water I pull out when vacuuming is almost black. My tank is a little over two years old.
 
I do vacuum the sand in my tank with each water change. I was asking the age of the set up because if it has been up for longer than six months or so, I would suggest being very careful to begin with. If I were going to begin to vacuum the sand in a tank that had been going for a while I would only do a small section at a time over several days if not a week or more. It would all depend on the tank size as to how long it may take to end up with all of the sand done, after all of the sand had been done once, then I wouldn't see a problem doing all of it at once with each water change.

Don't just dive in there and stir up a big sandstorm and or release a bunch of gasses from the sand, be gentle and take your time.

This is JMO and is how I keep up with the sand bed in my 300G reef, I also always vacuumed the sand in the 125 I had up before the 300 and have never had a problem with doing so.

You lose very little sand if you take your time and vacuum slowly.
 
You don't lose much sand if you suck up the sand into the larger part of the vacuum and then pinch the hose. By doing this you allow the sand to fall to the bottom while the stuff you want out remains suspended in the tube. When you release your your pinch on the hose all the bad stuff is sucked out.
 
Yeah how can people tell others NOT to vacuum the sand ever?

I just dont get it...
Good sand Maint keeps tanks from Crashing. Ive been setup since 06-1989 (moved several times now too) and have Never had a "Crash".

I Just moved to a 100 Gal setup, and for the first time went with all new sand. Still have the same live rock Ive had since tank inception though.

They call it "Old Tank Syndrom"... I call it "You were too lazy to vacuum the sand, so your sediment built up and crashed your tank after 3+ years"
 
i vacuum my sand every water change and it stays as clean and white as the day i got it. But i agree with Stray Voltage, do a little at a time just so you dont trigger and problems. do like 1/4 a weekly water change.
 
Well I am glad to see I am not the only one that keeps the sand bed cleaned.
Like dbdisok said, once you have some of the sand sucked up into the vacuum throttle the flow and let the sand fall back down and all the ugly stuff you want out will stay suspended and be pulled out.

After you try it you will see how easy it is. It only takes a few minutes longer to vacuum your sand while doing a water change than it takes to just take the water out.
 
i try to clean mine in the 70 gal .. its a pain ...its only 1-2" deep .... the big tank will not have a sand bed ... maybe a light dusting other than that nothing !
 
The answer to this question depends on the sand bed you have. If you are keeping a DSB for biological reasons, you most definitely do not want to vaccuum it. However, if you are keeping a thin sand bed for aesthetics reasons only, then vaccuuming is just fine, especially if done regularly.
 
"You don't lose much sand if you suck up the sand into the larger part of the vacuum and then pinch the hose. By doing this you allow the sand to fall to the bottom while the stuff you want out remains suspended in the tube. When you release your your pinch on the hose all the bad stuff is sucked out. "

Fantastic description of technique. Keep a little flow going so the nasty silt doesn't escape as you drop the sand - there will be lots of bad stuff (hydrogen sulfide, etc) in the cloud. It can take 6 months for the anaerobic and anoxic bacteria to develop in the deeper layers. These are the ones that break Nitrates into Nitrogen gas, which bubbles out. If you keep this in mind when vacumming, with such a set up, I tyicially surface vacuum the whole bed to a half inch deep. Then I section the tank out and every water change, I vacuum about 10% of the sand to the bottom. This is where you have to be careful about that silt cloud - siphon all of it out so it doesn't spread and disperse nutrients or disease organisms. By just doing 10% or so and doing a different area each time, you eliminate a portion of the stored nutrient load while retaining most of the anaerobes that eat Nitrates and allowing the vacuumed areas to recover. Oxygen is actually detrimental to a lot of the organisms that live in O2 depleted areas. Those guys get their oxygen for metabolism from Nitrates - NO3. Bob Goemans wrote a great booklet called "Live Sand Secrets" available online and at many LFS. I've got several reefs going on 10+ years with these techniques and Nitrates are well controlled by the DSB if maintained.
 
That's all really interesting. I'm getting ready to hit the 2.5 year mark, and my sand is not pretty anymore. I've suspected that its full of gunk for a while but I've always read to leave it alone. I never thought of just doing a little all the way to the bottom at a time.
 
A friend uses a shag carpet analogy. You really only vacuum out a percentage of the dirt. Long term maintenance requires periodic deep cleaning, in my experience. Since the sand is alive, you just have to do bits at a time to keep the rest happy. Do be careful with the silt that settles when you drop the sand. It is quite toxic, but can be managed with the siphon pinch that dbdisok described and constant gentle flow in the vacuum.
 
Silt meaning the cloud that comes up? So I would assume that you turn your pumps off during this endeavor? btw, I like the shag carpet analogy.
 
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