Washing sand

[Mr31415]

I have a 4 month old tank, 550l, 80kg LR and a shallow aragonite sand bed. I will be moving in the next week, so this is the perfect opportunity to do some maintenance work.

I want to know whether it is bad (i.e. will it kill the bacteria) if I lightly wash my aragonite before placing it back when I set up the tank on the other side? I washed a little bit just now (about 1kg of sand) which had lots of cyno growing on it - and it took 8 washes with newly mixed salt water to have clean water flowing out of the container. Between the algae and detritus the sand bed is DIRTY.

I lightly rinsed it by swirling the tub...

Any comments/opinions would be highly appreciated.

 

[Mr31415]

??

 

[sir_dudeguy]

washing with saltwater wont kill the bacteria...but it will lose you quite a few pods and whatnot. IMO you're better off just getting a good cleanup crew and letting them clean the sand. My diamond goby did awsome with the sand. It had an algae carpet on there, and he ate it all in like 3 days. Best part was he also took flake food and frozen food...so i know they dont just require stuff like pods to survive, so there's no worry that it'll starve.

 

[Sk8r]

It will all be de-layered when you move: I'm facing the same thing. I'd siphon off any obvious detritus from the top of the containered sand, but leave the rest of it as is, and figure the water is going to be cloudy as all get-out when you rewater, too, until the sand layers reestablish and the bacteria migrate to where they need to be. You may face a mini-cycle: I'm expecting one. But it should be real short unless there's a several days' delay in the process of moving and setup.

Personally, I'm very interested in this: don't intend to hijack here, but I'm considering mixing in some new, finer sand when I move, and maybe doing a pretty major replacement of much of the top of the bed: I've got medium grade aragonite, and it's just full of coral lumps that turn dark algae red. I'd like to get something much finer. And I know THAT will create a small cycle, but I'm wondering how much, among a dozen other little improvements I want to make in my setup.

 

[lllosingit]

It's not going to hurt anything, I think it would be better to do it now and then buy a clean up crew to help keep it clean in the future. You could possibly harm a little bacteria but with the bacteria in the live rock and whats left in the substrate there should be plenty.
When doing the move just treat the liverock the same as you would if it were a live fish, Keep it covered in water and don't let it get to hot or cold.

 

[lllosingit]

Sk8r
The cycle you have will depend on how much bacteria is left in the tank when you set it back up, If you have liverock it will carry loads of bacteria, You can also throw a filter sponge in the sump or tank a couple weeks before the planned work/move to help carry bacteria over to the new setup.

 

[outy]

4 months old, shallow, i say clean it in salt water no reason not too