Keeping your sand bed clean helps keep your reef tank healthy and thriving. Keeping your sand bed clean can be accomplished in two general categories manual methods and natural methods.
Manual methods involve cleaning the sand manually. Natural methods rely on the use of cleanup crew members that clean or stir up the sand for you. Below is a list of different manual and natural methods to clean and keep clean your sand bed.
A word of caution, if you have a long-established reef tank with a deep sand bed you must take caution before cleaning your sand bed. Overtime waste will settle into sand beds and get trapped. If you release too much of this into the environment at once you do risk changing water chemistry and potentially causing a catastrophic die-off in the tank.
One approach is to divide your tank into sections and clean one section a week during water changes. For this method, you use a siphon vacuum.
Aquarium Siphons come in various sizes with different features to help start the siphon. Aquarium siphons typically have a soft hose tubing that connects to a hard plastic tube. A siphon is created that pulls water through the tube and hose out of the tank into a container. This method is best done during a regular water change as you are removing water from the tank that will be replenished during the water change.
Start your siphon depending on the siphon device you have. Once the water is draining with no air coming through the tube you are ready to start cleaning sand. Your siphon should have enough suction to pull small amounts of sand into the tube. Lightly press the tube into the sand and you should see sand sucked into the siphon tube and some of it stirring up in the tube. Moving the siphon off the bed and back onto the sand bed will exchange gravel in the tube.
Slowly make this up and down motion throughout the tank sand bed in the areas that you want to clean. Take your time and try to trap as much of the waste in the tube as possible. Once you have covered the area you want to cover continue with your water change and add fresh saltwater into the tank. This method works great and can be done as needed or even during every water change. There are a lot of beneficial bacteria and other life that live in the sand bed so I like to do this on an as-needed basis to not disturb bacteria and other life populations.
If your bed is very dirty you may need to repeat a few times to get the bed where you want it. This is another method very similar to the above method. For this method, you take the same steps as the previous above method, but instead of draining the water into a separate container for removal, you drain the water into a filter sock in your sump while your return pumps are on. This method will allow you to continuously siphon if you have a large area to clean. Once you are finished, you simply break the siphon and remove the filter sock for cleaning.
There is the potential for dissolved organic waste to slip through the filter sock and end up in the water column. Stirring the sand is a great way to keep your sand looking nice when it is done consistently. For this method, you simply use an item to gently stir the sand bed.
You can use any item for this task, on my tank I use the long set of aquarium tongs as pictured. I simply insert the tongs into the sand bed and gently stir up the sand. This is a good method to use once a week if your sand bed is relatively clean.
Doing this consistently will keep the sand bed clean. You may see slight cloudiness in your water after this method, but it usually dissipates and clears up in under an hour.
This is not a method I would use if you have a deep dirty sand bed as it would release the waste directly into the water column. This method is best as a maintenance task with a generally clean well-maintained sand bed. This method is the same as the above method, with the addition of microbubbles. Microbubbles can be created by moving your powerhead up so it is partially exposed to air or you can run your water level slightly low in the sump so that the return pumps create microbubbles.
After stirring up your sand the microbubbles will attach to waste in the water column and move the waste to the top of the tank and eventually down into the sump where it can be processed by filter socks or the protein skimmer. This method helps clear up the water quickly can help remove a higher amount of waste before it can settle back into the bed after stirring.
Be sure to swap new socks and empty your skimmer after this method. The turkey baster method is another way to easily stir up the sand bed. Simply use a general kitchen turkey baster to blow water into the sand bed. You can control the amount of force used by how hard you squeeze the baster.
The use of a turkey baster can be used in conjunction with other methods for hard-to-reach places in the tank. Another type of baster you can use is coral feeders which are typically longer than a turkey baster to help keep your hands and arms out of the tank.
A turkey baster also can serve double duty as a way to blow debris and waste off of the live rock. Members Current visitors New profile posts Search profile posts. Log in Register. Search titles only. Search Advanced search…. New posts. Search forums. Log in. Install the app.
For a better experience, please enable JavaScript in your browser before proceeding. You are using an out of date browser. It may not display this or other websites correctly. You should upgrade or use an alternative browser. How do you Siphon the sand? Thread starter BigAl07 Start date Mar 5, Not how like how do you DO it but what do you use? I've been using a "small" siphon tube from Walley-World that's designed for smaller 10g tanks.
It only picks up and "siphons" dust like particles and due to the small diameter of the drain hose has very little "power". Let me warn you.. So what do you peeps that have slightly larger tanks say 55 and up use for this? For the hard to reach areas I just use a small siphon hose. But for the open sand bed I have a small vaccuum cleaner brush attachment that I put on the end of the hose and brush the sand.
It picks up the crud but "mostly" leaves the sand. Very little sand gets sucked up. I blow the sand with the baster to suspend the detritus pumps all off so it doesn't blow away and suck it up with the hose. Also, in the event that I have cayano sp? I then swirl the bucket and it seems to separate the algae from the sand, the algae floats in the bucket especially while swirling the water , and I dump the water which leaves the clean sand behind.
Doing so will help keep organic material in check and, consequently less nutrients will be available for algae. Allows your sand bed to function efficiently. Bacteria therein will process ammonia, nitrite and nitrates. I have a two spot goby and several Nassuras snails that turn up my sand bed, plus pods that live in it. However, I currently do not touch my sand bed of inch, nitrate is at 0. I also change my water weekly, so that might help out, and I always remember to wash my filter pads weekly too, plus I run a nice skimmer on the tank.
All of my life looks good, and nothing have died yet, but I do take very good care of things since I really enjoy fish tanks.
You have some creatures that help clear the SB and aerate it, so you may not need to vacuum much if at all at least early on in the tank's life. If you start to get persistent nitrate in the higher ranges, even though you are performing regular WCs, then your SB should to vacuumed on a regular basis. For a thin sandbed like yours, syphoning once in a while is probably a good idea. Thin sandbeds will not support a healthy population of critters that would normally do the job for you in a deep sand bed ie.
It's just a large diameter tube on one end attached to plastic tubing. I bought a plastic valve at the hardware store which I spliced into the tubing so that I can control the rate of flow. I just pinch the hose to control the flow. I'm still amazed at how much junk comes out of my sand every week.
I've got a couple including one perfect sized for my nano. Now I always vac gravel in my freshwater tanks however every time I try in saltwater it sucks up too much sand - almost like I need to put a screen in the tube.
I don't have overly fine stand either. So how would you go about doing this on a sand bed in a 40b, 1. Small sections at a time? I'm assuming doing the whole thing at once would cause some issues? Thanks, just tried this and it was pretty effective. Now I'm sure I'll wake up to either a diatom or algae bloom in the morning! I am 4 weeks from the start of my cycle.
I have had, hair, turf, red slime, and the usual brown algae blooms and all are gone or in the process of leaving now. A few days ago I did a full gravel vac I used the smallest gravel vac there was and took care not to create a detritus storm.
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