Sand, Home Depot

TrojanScott

TrojanScott

Active member
Hi everyone,

I'm upgrading from my 180 to a 300, and am trying to slowly plan things for the hellish weekend of the transfer, still to be determined.

I've got some extra rock, and have a contact with more, so I think I'm covered there. I've started to make salt water. What I am going to need is sand, and I certainly am not buying bags of live sand to seed this thing, well, not all of it anyway.

I've done this in the past, but it's been near 15 years. Any sand from home depot is okay, correct? Rinse the heck out of it, and mix it with live, should be good to go?

My plan is to do about 50/50. I'll use sand from my current tank, unless someone can convince me that's a bad idea, and use HD sand, and buy some live sand to mix with. I'm not doing a DSB, probably only 2 inches worth, if that. Still, for a 300, it's a lot of sand.

Any thoughts or input would be appreciated.

Thanks
 
Home Depot "œplay sand" is silica based... I would not use it, while I don't believe it, I have heard you can have horrible silicate problems because of it.

You can just buy dry sand, it's cheeper than live sand or buy old sand from some one and bleach the <font size="3" color="#0000FF">profanity removed</font> out if it in a brute trash can for a week.
 
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Southdown sand is aragonite ultra- fine it was too fine in my opinion but at 10 bucks for a 50lb bag you couldn't go wrong the stuff we got out here in California I believe was brought over by some reefers who bought a pallet I had a couple bags of it at one point back in 05

I would suggest you figure out what size grain your current sand is and stick with that same grain size as mixing grades of sand can lead to compaction and other issues in your sand bed

Using your old sand is fine but I would highly suggest putting it into a 5 gallon buckets on your lawn and running the garden hose through it until it runs clear you will be amazed how much black stuff comes out once you have it flushed you can put it into some deionized water with a chlorine sequestrant and let it sit overnight then it can go into the new tank. You can do the same with sand you get from other people as long as you follow the caveat on grain size. Yes it will nuke all of your bacteria and microlife but that is the cost of flushing it out once you have the tank setup get a few scoops of live sand from a few different reefers with nice tanks to help establish the bacterial colony during cycling

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Oh yeah if you are getting sand from other people make sure they have not been using copper assuming you have a reef tank :-)

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Sandtastik Sand:
NO crystalline silica
NO quartz
NO asbestos - all types
NO wheat or gluten
NO nuts or seeds - all types
 
savethereef said:
yeah home depot had the Southdown stuff many years ago.
I sold about 300 pounds to a guy when i broke down my 225 before.
beautiful white sand. I would not risk it with the new sand.
If you can track down South Down get it.

http://www.reefcentral.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1437287

even says silica free
http://www.reefcentral.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=1540117
Click to expand...

Do you guys remember Murry ? He was a manager or assistant manager of a HD in the Chino area. He defiantly had the hookup back then for the Southdown sand. It was around 1999-2001.. Those were the days, meet and greets at Larry's house, coral frags coming out of the woodwork.
 
Get dry sand from Marine Depot .

Still need to rinse and clean but far safer and much cheaper then doing it wrong.

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Its funny that people dont mind to spend 300$ for a frags however they skim on others things that could cause problem for their reef tank. Once algae start then u wish u spend a little extra and buy tropic edens pink tonga sand its the best dont even have to rinse.
 
I'm not a $300 frag guy, I can tell you that, but I get your point. Not looking to skimp, but save money. Especially when in my experience, you can throw in just about any sand and have zero issues. I'm in the camp that a bag of live sand is a rip off. It may have some live stuff in it. May. Once you put live rock on the sand, it'll be live soon enough. Paying $30 for a 20lb bag of sand? I'll put my money to more useful things for my reef tank.
 
Let me first start of with, I'm running FO. With that said, I don't know if my suggestion will be helpful in a reef situation. When I first started out I was dumbfounded by the price of sand and refused to pay the sort of price for aquarium sand. So having done some digging no pun there ;), I realized there where alternatives to the sand, playsand not being one but rather an economical option being pool filter sand based on other threads in these fine forums. Ironically, HD carries this as well $5.48 for 50#. It did require a thorough washing and is quite course but in my application works great.

Gluck

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I was in Reef Tropical Fish in Santa Ana about a week ago and he had some big bags of aquarium sand over near the salt water stuff. I don't remember how much they were but it wasn't the aragalive price.
 
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