I think the answer to your question is a little more complicated, although the method above seems to work well for some people. My first response is to ask a few questions:
What do you want the sand bed to do? For, example, is it merely for aesthetic purposes, or do you want to keep life that depends upon a sandbed in one way or another. Or, do you intend to have the sandbed function as part of your biological nutirent processing? Also, what size grain to you plan to get? How deep do you want the bed to be?
It sounds as though you want to have sand in the tank for aesthetic reasons (absolutely nothing wrong with that!) and that cleanliness is a concern to you for obvious reasons: looks and keeping the excess detritus from building up. If this is the case, I'm going to suggest a very shallow bed, say an inch and a half only, of medium sized aragonite. You will be able to vacuum this without sucking it all up. Stemming the siphon flow as you vac, will help. You may need to add some new sand every once in a great while, but that's probably a good thing.
BTW, there are no dumb questions. We're all still trying to find ways to improve what we do. There are only a couple people here who know everything already.
By way of example, I run three small tanks right now. Each has a different methodology which is directly related to substrate issues. My oldest and most successful tank by far uses a shallow sand bed, two and one half inch of mixed fine and medium grain aragonite. I don't touch this sand ever. I enjoy watching the life that it supports, but I don't keep a lot of fish and I rely on my skimmer and sump with macro for nutrient export. There are a couple large nassarius snails, lots of worms and a cucumber working it. I have another tank that has no sump. I battled with this tank for a long time until a different approach to substrate saved it. It used to be about five inches of mixed grain size. I wanted it to work more like a deep sand bed. The previous owner ran it this way with a plenum, successfully, he said. I didn't run a plenum. After about a year, I ran into serious nutrient problems, which took me a long time to correct. Right now it's set up like I've recommended to you. I've got only an inch (max) of medium sized aragonite. It's a breeze to vacuum and I do that with every WC. My third tank is set up bare bottom. It's even easier to clean, but looks entirely different.
Hope this helps and doesn't add to the confusion. Best of luck.
