crushed coral-clean it or leave it?

[ecomdesign]

My tank is about 1.5 years old. I have a 1-2" bed of crushed coral. I've never touched it/vacuumed it. It got stirred up a few weeks ago due to a poorly placed powerhead and I've been battling a little outbreak. I bought a dual carbon/gfo reactor from BFS and its starting to get better. Obviously my sand bed has some nasty stuff in it. Should I do anything to it? Stir it up a bit maybe? It’s actually got some coralline growing on the surface in spots!

What do you recommend? Leave it alone, or do some sort of cleanup?

[Michael]

if its just an inch or maybe 2 in places then you should be able to vaccum it with a freshwater type gravel cleaner, any deeper and id suggest you remove it.

[Sk8r]

Do you have a fuge?
If I were going to change out a cc sandbed, I'd either 1) go cup or two at a time, removing it and putting in a cup of washed aragonite limestone and letting that settle and age past algae-growth stage before proceeding to the next cup. 2) or establish a large fuge with a deep sandbed, let it get well established, and THEN pull the cc sandbed, pretty well all at once, and if it's filthy, I'd have a diatom filter ready to run a fast cleanup on the water. A diatom filter is rare these days, and in frequent use would scrub tank water TOO clean, stripping out microlife, but when dealing with cc, they're not a bad thing to have as a recourse.

[IslandCrow]

It's generally recommended to clean a crushed coral bed. I'd look into a gravel vacuum. Unfortunately, those crushed coral beds trap a ton of gunk. At only 2", I don't think you have to worry about releasing anything too nasty, but I know I'd feel much more comfortable with a gravel vac to suck up whatever's lying beneath rather than just stirring it up into the waterstream.

[Chris27]

Vacuum it regularly, I do this even with shallow sand beds. I do weekly water changes in my tank, and I vacuum the sand each time with a gravel vac.

http://www.marinedepot.com/maintenan...leaner-ap.html

The sand stays cleaner, and the chance of having pockets of toxic gasses is reduced significantly.

[ecomdesign]

I have a small sphion vac, but I've never used it before. I could give it a try. I have been reading up on diatom filters in Paulb's thread on his 35 (now 40) year old reef thread. I might wait to attempt vacing the cc until I get my hands on one, just in case the water gets dirty.

[Sk8r]

It shouldn't with a regular vacuum. But if you have cc it's not a bad backup to have in case of disaster. They were designed to yank everything 1 micron and increasingly smaller from the water. It can take a green water tank to crystal clear in under an hour. BUT they are not for regular use. You might also consider some nassarius snails: they live under sand (if the sand is not too jagged or compacted) and eat detritus.

[drew1]

My fish-only tank has crushed coral, and has for 25+ years. I vacuum a section of the bed everytime I do a water change. I never clean the whole thing at one time. I'm not going to argue the merits of one type of bed over another, or one filtration system over another, but I will say that I don't believe that my crushed coral / undergravel filter has ever been the cause of any problems in the aquarium. As with everything in this hobby, make sure you don't do anything to an extreme. Removing the bed would be an extreme, as would never cleaning the crushed gravel would be an extreme. If you like the look, keep the crushed coral.

[spw4949]

I have crushed coral as a substrate & I vacuum the entire area every 2 weeks when I do my H20 change, HTH...........

[Chris27]

Any tank, SW, FW, turtles, frogs, etc.. can benefit from regular cleaning of the substrate. Waste sinks to the bottom, and the substrate does a spectacular job of grabbing it all up. A combination of detritus eating livestock and a thorough vacuuming only makes things better.

I figure if you like the crushed coral, keep it, if you want to change it out, go for it, but like mentioned before, slow and steady wins the race. The crushed coral substrate is part of your bio-filter, and given the porus make-up of it, it's probably a large part of the bio-filter. Removing it too quickly could have negative effects.

Give that gravel vac a try, I'm certain you'll find it really does a good job when you look at the black water in your bucket after you're done.

[bertoni]

If the tank is doing well enough, I'd just leave the crushed coral as is. The worst case is that it begins to leach nutrients into the water column. I'd replace it if that becomes a problem. The reactor might solve the looks problem.