How do you clean used sand?

[ZoeReef]

A friend gave me 100 lbs of southdown out of the DSB he just took down.

I've been told that you need to clean up the sand before re-using it. (Bleach?)

Anyone have any thoughts on how to clean it up? I have LS to seed it with, so I'm not trying to keep it alive. Thanks

[Konadog]

One way is to fill a 5 gallon bucket 1/4 full of sand and wash it with a hose until the water runs clear. Then dump in on a sheet of plastic and let it dry in the sun. You may have to turn it all a few times to get it dry again. You can dump it into a new tank wet, but the drying will kill off anything the fresh water didn't. It takes some time, but it works.

[ZoeReef]

thanks ken. I appreciate the info

[jer77]

I believe waterkeeper was just saying to wash in bleach overnight and then if its aragonite, which it is, then wash with vinegar or citric acid to take off the phosphates.

[ZoeReef]

I think I'll keep rinsing it till it's fairly clear, then add bleach for a day, then vinegar. Anything that's still alive at that point is welcome in my new tank. Thanks for the tip!

[kgolem]

Originally posted by ZoeReef
I think I'll keep rinsing it till it's fairly clear, then add bleach for a day, then vinegar.

If it is aragonite, then vinegar would be the stuff that you wouldn't want to use. Aragonite is an alkali material, you should rinse with same. Citric acid or vinegar will dissolve the calcium in the material.

Take a spoon full of aragonite and wet it with a few drops of vinegar, if it is aragonite, then there will a significant reaction.

[jer77]

thats the reason for doing it. It will dissolve off the outer layer of the aragonite and takes a lot of the phosphates with it. You end up with pure aragonite. It woould take a lot of vinegar to dissolve all of the aragonite, so its ok to do.

[ZoeReef]

I put some in a small dish with vinegar and it fizzed like crazy. Guess we have the real deal

[kgolem]

ZoeReef; I would really like to know how this turns out, keep us posted please.

[ZoeReef]

sure.

Here in AZ, we do not have access to Southdown. Aragonite sand costs about $1.00 per pound. If I had a cheap source of sand, I would certainly not hassle with it. But seeing as I need about 200-250 lbs, the hassle is worth it.

I got my used sand from a new friend who had it sitting in the bottom of an emptied tank in his garage. Well I decided not to try to keep this as live sand because there was a 10 week spread between when it came out of a tank and when it was going into a tank. The risks were simply too high.

I brought the sand home and I first used a strainer to clean the sand of all the misc shells, dead critters. I only saw two obviously alive snails and I put them in my existing nano. The water smelled brackish, kind of like a swamp.

I'm guessing I have about 100-120 lbs of sand here.

I put all this sand in a cooler, out on my driveway, and using a hose on medium flow, I began to 'drill down' into the sand to clean it with fresh water. There was a lot of dark dirt that overflowed the cooler. When that obvious crud eased up, I turned down the flow and let it just slowly rinse. When I remembered it, I went back outside.

I had a second large cooler and I filled it up half way with water and poured bleach in. How much? I went overkill and poured about a quart in. I don't know what the right amount is.

***I REALLY DON'T KNOW WHAT I'M DOING..SO THE QUART IS TOTALLY A GUESS AND NOT A RECIPE***

I let it sit overnight. This morning I dumped it out in the driveway, filled it fresh water, dumped it, and rinsed through it. The sand is very clean looking.

Now I had to get rid of the bleach. I went through the same drilling down into the sand, until I couldn't smell any bleach.

I filled the now empty first cooler with water and a quart of cheap white vinegar (about a quart, same disclaimer), and moved the sand into this cooler. The purpose of the bleach was to kill everything. The purpose of the vinegar is to get rid of soaked up phosphates. The vinegar will dissolve them. Well, that's where I am right now.

[10" Red Devil]

Guess my only concern after all this cleaning is that your still going to have dead things in there and that will add large amounts of organics to your tank. How will you rid these from the sand. The decaying bodies of algae, worms, etc will leach phosphates, nitrates, etc into your system.

[ZoeReef]

Red...Well that's certainly a good point an certainly a part of this adventure. My sifting of the sand removed all of the large pieces. When I look at the sand I see no difference at this point between what I am treating, and the clean store bought stuff that I also have.

Of course there is much that is not visible to the eye. I've got until the end of the month before I use this stuff, so it might be a good exercise to take some out, add salt water and measure what's in that water.

VINEGAR UPDATE. Adding one quart to about 4 gallons of water was ineffective. I went and bought a cheap gallon bottle for about $2.50 and that worked great. Got some way fizzy sand going. The water that was clean when I added the white vinegar is now a pale ugly brown. My guess is that it's doing it's job.

[DitchPlains2]

sand bleh bleh.....good luck

[ZoeReef]

Ditch, but consider that if it works, there's got to be 5 million or more particles of clean sand. How wonderful to have 5 million successes..

[whatevva]

Guess my only concern after all this cleaning is that your still going to have dead things in there and that will add large amounts of organics to your tank. How will you rid these from the sand. The decaying bodies of algae, worms, etc will leach phosphates, nitrates, etc into your system.

I agree...throw it away

[ZoeReef]

Throw it away...after all this fun?

Actually it's a fair amount of work to restore it to 'like new' conditions. But at this point this sand is very clean. If there is an abundance of dead and decaying materials in this sand, it will show up on tests over the next couple of weeks. I'm going to drain all the freshwater out tomorrow, and put saltwater in. I will measure NO1, NO2 and NO3 over the next two weeks just to see what happens. Now, I'm curious.

[scarter]

me to, Ill tag along

[xtrstangx]

Ammonia is actually NH3

[jer77]

Ya I heard to do this, but I have never tried. I always just save a little and then throw the rest away. Without a cheap source for aragonite anymore I'd like to try it to sometime.

[ZoeReef]

xtrs..thanks! I always appreciate a friend who tells me, 'oh by the way your pants are in your socks. So will be checking out NH3, NO2 and NO3.

An interesting sidelight. Sand packs down, and to stir it I used a big wide spatula. When I mixed in the vinegar (I had poured out almost all the water, just enough to cover the sand) into the sand, it fizzed like crazy. While it was fizzing, I mixed it so the vinegar would get into all the sand. A couple of hours later, I went outside. The fizzing had stopped, lots of ugly stuff on top, but when I mixed it with the spatula, it was totally loose. At this time it's outside in clean fresh water. Tomorrow I'll dump that and do a water change on my aquarium. I'll put the waste salt water into the sand outside.

[kgolem]

Thanks for keeping us updated. Sounds like you are on the right track with the sand.

[DitchPlains2]

my sand made it all of 25 feet behind my house to the beach, where I am sure its helping errosion...lol Sand belongs on the Dunes not in my tank...lol just my two cents, but interesting thread. I would have shipped ya my 100+lbs of sand from my 7 inch dsb if I just knew ya about 3 months ago.lol

David

[ZoeReef]

Well thanks David. It's been an interesting, low cost project. It's as much to see 'if it can be done' as anything else. Actually, next year we're building a 600g tank and we'll be taking all this with us so in many ways it's kind of a dress rehearsal.

[ZoeReef]

Here's the sand after the bleach, vinegar treatment. Smells clean.



Here's the sand cleaning technology break through. I had been stirring this sand to make sure all the bleach was out, then that all the vinegar was out. Then a brainstorm occurred.

I took a piece of filter material (identical piece on the ground next to the cooler) and put it down next to the drain. I then put sand on top of it. I tilted it up a bit, put in a hose, and water is draining nicely through all the sand. This works WAY cool.

[jer77]

Looks like some clean aragonite to me! Good job.