Ditch the playsand?

[Nick S]

So I recently got my tank up and running again a few months ago. It's stocked with live Rick some fish and corals. I set it up the way I had years ago including a deep sand bed in the tank and fuge. In the tank, about 2 inches below the sand surface, I have an eggcrate shelf as I did before to stop anything in the tank from burrowing too low. I couldn't find Southdown sand so I got dessert play sand from Home Depot. A lot of sand. The tank is 72 x 24 footprint and the fuge is 48 x 18 footprint. 6 inch sand bed in fuge and 4 inch in show tank. Now I'm reading posts lately of people advising me to ditch the playsand. Should I do that? It would be a huge project and might jeopardize the livestock. How bad is this sand for my tank? Also, I ordered grunge from garf to seed it but they don't seem to respond right now, I hope everything's ok. Anyone know of another place to get stuff to seed my beds?

Thanks in advance!!!

[CyclistMT]

The sand itself is fine. It's basically inert. You will get doom and gloom stories of silicates coming out of the sand creating diatom blooms but if that would truly happen wouldn't the glass of our tanks also cause diatom blooms since the glass was once sand itself?

Anyway, I used a silica sand in my last tank and there are a couple of reasons that I would aviod its use but they can also be managed.

First, it can scratch glass. Silica sand is very hard and if it gets caught under a mag float, it WILL scratch the glass.

Second, it does compact quite a bit and will create pockets of hydrogen sulfide as it ages unless you have very active sand stirrers, really-really good flow, or manual stirring by you when you do a water change.

I do not subscribe to the theory that you should never disturb a sand bed. Once that's been in place for a while that has never been actively managed, yes you would need to be careful with if you were to start to disturb it at the risk of liberating phosphate. However yours has not been in place very long so if you start regular maintenance on it now you should be fine. You don't have to do all of it at once but something like a different 1/3 every water change would help keep it clean while still providing anerobic capacity.

In the tank I used the silica sand in I had a surge for a while that did a great job of creating advection through the sand bed helping to keep it clean. I only noticed H2S buildup after I removed the surge.

I hope that helps.





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