Deep sand beds?
- Thread starter SteveZ15
- Start date
- Location
- Ossining, NY
you're going to get varied opinions on this.
My continued response will be that the ocean has a sand bed. Ever see a bare bottom ocean?
I have shallow sand bed in my display (4") and 2 deep sand beds in remote tanks connected to the system (easily removable if they went bad) which are over 6" deep each.
Tanks have been running since 2007.
HTH
House
My continued response will be that the ocean has a sand bed. Ever see a bare bottom ocean?
I have shallow sand bed in my display (4") and 2 deep sand beds in remote tanks connected to the system (easily removable if they went bad) which are over 6" deep each.
Tanks have been running since 2007.
HTH
House
Im more leaning to deep vs shallow.. I also think it would be good learning experience to let nature work in the tank. I guess its personal prefrence and how the bed is maintained I know one thing it has to be aged well before it can be disturbed in spots here and there. Thanks
+1. Big time. Even if you don't go barebottom, a small amount of sand is better than a DSB, IMO.
Eventually... the DSB will fill up and no more detritus can 'be processed'.. then what? How will you know if the DSB is "full"?
If you're keeping animals that require a sandbed, like wrasses, jawfish, carpet anemones, etc. then obviously that's a different story.
- Location
- Rego Park, Queens
My tanks have sandbeds of about 3" or so, maybe a bit deeper in my 55 gal tank. I would never go without one. I hate the looks of bare bottom tanks, and I just love the amount of life that accumulates in a sandbed. Constantly full of spaghetti worms. Also love the sight of my Ilyanassa snails rising out of the sand as soon as food touches the water.
- Location
- Deer Park,Long Island,11729
I'm just curious why you would be interested in keeping detritus(fish poo) around in what is basically a nitrat factory to eventually some day fill up and most likely crash your system.
Is it to feed worms? Or the so called clean up crew you think is going to eat it.
By the way thouse clean up crews poo also...who eats that?
Chato you say? So...so far we are told to keep fish poo in our sand beads to keep a bunch of stuff for me has nothing to do with why I keep a glass box with corals and fish in it.
Our glass boxes with corals and fish from different regions can not be compared to the ocean.
DSB can and have worked for some but eventually that sandbed will fill up and don't dair disturb it after a few years ..why because all that fish poo and detritus you have been told to save will crash your tank.
IMOP it is better to keep a shallow sandbed you can siphon each week and remove the detritus or go bair bottom with great flow to put the detritus up into the water collom and removed by the skimmer.
You can't keep putting nitrates (food for fish and corals )into a systum without removing it...what you put it you must take out wether it's uneaten or pooed out.
Just something to think about
Is it to feed worms? Or the so called clean up crew you think is going to eat it.
By the way thouse clean up crews poo also...who eats that?
Chato you say? So...so far we are told to keep fish poo in our sand beads to keep a bunch of stuff for me has nothing to do with why I keep a glass box with corals and fish in it.
Our glass boxes with corals and fish from different regions can not be compared to the ocean.
DSB can and have worked for some but eventually that sandbed will fill up and don't dair disturb it after a few years ..why because all that fish poo and detritus you have been told to save will crash your tank.
IMOP it is better to keep a shallow sandbed you can siphon each week and remove the detritus or go bair bottom with great flow to put the detritus up into the water collom and removed by the skimmer.
You can't keep putting nitrates (food for fish and corals )into a systum without removing it...what you put it you must take out wether it's uneaten or pooed out.
Just something to think about
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- Location
- Howell, NJ
shallow sand bed...
- Location
- brooklyn
Shallow sand bed will keep water healthier and makes cleaning your glass easier. I would go will shallow all the way. Cleaner looking also.
I thought point of the sand bed was to process the stuff that collects on the bottom and gets turned into gas and released by the animals that stir up the top layer.. I get where the shallow sand is good so it can be siphoned .
When you have a shallow bed do you have snails and hermits in it or not because the bottom gets cleaned. I never did a reef just fish so the sand was clean but i see all these things that live in a reef tank so i thought the sandbed was more usefull.
- Location
- Deer Park,Long Island,11729
How? ..Lest think about this.
Fish poo? Old food that fish did not eat? Clean up crew poo?
What...... we leave this in the tank to turn into bacteria ?
To eat ( or process as you say) more poo or more bacteria ?
Not even sure about the turning into gas part but it dose seem like it would take a awful long time to store this much poo in our systems to make this happen if it even dose happen this way?
I bet if you have a really DSB like 10 inches it would take a really long time before the system crashes lol
Something ells to think about.
Do you know all thous pretty colors like brown,green&red you see in a DSB?
What do you think that is? Not something I want to look at in my tank.
DSB works ( the deeper the better ) because the deeper it is the longer it takes for the nitrates to build up in the system and the clean up crew is just making the detritus smaller and driving it down deeper into the sanded along with their own poo.
Just seems to me a cleaner healthier system would be one that has less poo in it
- Location
- Deer Park,Long Island,11729
Sure they do eat some of the food the fish miss and I think hermits are cute.
But in no way are they going to rid your tank of all detritus.
- Location
- Flushing
A deep sand bed is the way to go. The most important part is grain size. It should be between 0.050 to 0.200mm. I see that alot of people here will say not to go with a deep sand bed but from all the research I've done all the experts say go DSB and hobbyists will say not to. this article is pretty good http://www.ronshimek.com/deep_sand_beds.html but you should read beyond this one.
By the way, I met a reefer on reef central who's had a DSB for 8 years. I saw no detritus and he said he hasn't touched the sand since he put the tank together.
By the way, I met a reefer on reef central who's had a DSB for 8 years. I saw no detritus and he said he hasn't touched the sand since he put the tank together.
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The reasoning for dsb sounds good . The experts say its good but im not one of them. It seems more people actually use the shallow .i guess its easier to go shallow and mabye experiment in the future im not at the point where i want to gamble with the life that will be in the tank. From the things i read and answers i get on this subject i didnt see enough people who actually use a dsb. So i will go with the shallow. Thanks for.the insight i rather ask a question than try something i dont fully knkw about or.have any experience with.. I.started to.buy things i need to run the tank and should.get.the.tank soon so some time in the new year i should have the tank started.
- Location
- Queens, NY
OK everyone is missing the point of a DSB. It is not meant to be a giant sponge to store the waste produced by the tank. It is there to allow a denitrification zone to form by allowing a gradient of oxygen from the maximim in the upper zone, to anoxic at the bottom zone. Anything less than 4-6" will not allow for this oxygen gradient to form. (You can also think of it as the biggest piece of homemade live rock you can stick in your tank, in terms of denitrifying ability) It also allows for the slow release of Ca and other trace elements back into the water.
They are not pretty things to see, and if you have space, you can hide the DSB in the sump or refugium, instead of the main tank. What other people discribe when they say their DSB is loaded with debris and biological waste, is a DSB system that is either too shallow too function, of have too much of a fish bioload for the DSB to handle. The original sucessfully runing aquariums, utilizing DSBs had very light bioloads, which allowed the sand bed itself to break down all the nutrients produced and maintain mineral levels in the water WITHOUT cloging the interstitial spaces with debris.
The DSB was developed by Jaubert at the Monaco aquarium and the method is named after him. Here is one of the MANY links out there discribing his technique.
http://www.advancedaquarist.com/2002/9/aafeature
From my personal experience, my 65 gallon tank has a foot print of 36 x 18 and is bare bottom. My sump/refugium is a 38 gallon (36 x 12) tank (totally filled with caluerpa) with a 6" deep bed of sand with 1/2" plenum, which provides 1.5 cubic feet of denitrifing power. However, this can only handle the bioload of fewer than 10 small 2" fish and a couple of 4-6" tangs and I'm contantly battling N and P levels with the help of calupra growth/ protein skimming and by controlled feedings. I also suppliment with Ca and baking soda for alkalinity to maintain my massive SPS growth. In this case, my DSB is no longer able to support the bioload (as least its helping), and definately not keeping up with my coral growth.
On the other hand, I have another 38 gallon utility tank with no filtration whatsoever, full of macro algae with some unwanted mushrooms, miscellaneous zooanthid and my outcast sexy shrimp colony (This is mainly used as a fish/coral observation tank) with a 4" DSB, (1.0 cubic feet of left over sand) a single powerhead and using 2 recycled T5 bulbs. This can easily handle a tang and a few small fish. I feed it lightly twice a week and I've never had any measureable levels of N or P. It could probably support the growth of a small SPS, but its growth would be limited by the rate of Ca disolution from the sand.
Oh, on a final note, and this may seem kind of interesting. I use to do 5 gallon water changes weekly between the 2 tanks, to help control the N and P in the main tank, when I was over feeding and the utility tank would clean up the water reducing the N and P to zero pretty quickly.
They are not pretty things to see, and if you have space, you can hide the DSB in the sump or refugium, instead of the main tank. What other people discribe when they say their DSB is loaded with debris and biological waste, is a DSB system that is either too shallow too function, of have too much of a fish bioload for the DSB to handle. The original sucessfully runing aquariums, utilizing DSBs had very light bioloads, which allowed the sand bed itself to break down all the nutrients produced and maintain mineral levels in the water WITHOUT cloging the interstitial spaces with debris.
The DSB was developed by Jaubert at the Monaco aquarium and the method is named after him. Here is one of the MANY links out there discribing his technique.
http://www.advancedaquarist.com/2002/9/aafeature
From my personal experience, my 65 gallon tank has a foot print of 36 x 18 and is bare bottom. My sump/refugium is a 38 gallon (36 x 12) tank (totally filled with caluerpa) with a 6" deep bed of sand with 1/2" plenum, which provides 1.5 cubic feet of denitrifing power. However, this can only handle the bioload of fewer than 10 small 2" fish and a couple of 4-6" tangs and I'm contantly battling N and P levels with the help of calupra growth/ protein skimming and by controlled feedings. I also suppliment with Ca and baking soda for alkalinity to maintain my massive SPS growth. In this case, my DSB is no longer able to support the bioload (as least its helping), and definately not keeping up with my coral growth.
On the other hand, I have another 38 gallon utility tank with no filtration whatsoever, full of macro algae with some unwanted mushrooms, miscellaneous zooanthid and my outcast sexy shrimp colony (This is mainly used as a fish/coral observation tank) with a 4" DSB, (1.0 cubic feet of left over sand) a single powerhead and using 2 recycled T5 bulbs. This can easily handle a tang and a few small fish. I feed it lightly twice a week and I've never had any measureable levels of N or P. It could probably support the growth of a small SPS, but its growth would be limited by the rate of Ca disolution from the sand.
Oh, on a final note, and this may seem kind of interesting. I use to do 5 gallon water changes weekly between the 2 tanks, to help control the N and P in the main tank, when I was over feeding and the utility tank would clean up the water reducing the N and P to zero pretty quickly.
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- Location
- Rego Park, Queens
The whole point of a deep sand bed is to eliminate the nitrate factory. The denitrifying bacteria convert nitrate to nitrogen gas. That said, my sand bed isn't deep enough to qualify as a DSB. But my tank has been going strong for 16 years now.
- Location
- Deer Park,Long Island,11729
So your tank has been running for 16 years without a DSB.
That is great!! congrats.
I guess we agree then it can be done both ways
- Location
- smithtown, long island
I'm just curious why you would be interested in keeping detritus(fish poo) around in what is basically a nitrat factory to eventually some day fill up and most likely crash your system.
Is it to feel worms? Or the so called clean up crew you think is going to eat it.
By the way thouse clean up crews poo also...who eats that?
Chato you say? So...so far we are told to keep fish poo in our sand beads to keep a bunch of stuff for me has nothing to do with why I keep a glass box with corals and fish in it.
Our glass boxes with corals and fish from different regions can not be compared to the ocean.
DSB can and have worked for some but eventually that sandbed will fill up and don't dair disturb it after a few years ..why because all that fish poo and detritus you have been told to save will crash your tank.
IMOP it is better to keep a shallow sandbed you can siphon each week and remove the detritus or go bair bottom with great flow to put the detritus up into the water collom and removed by the skimmer.
You can't keep putting nitrates (food for fish and corals )into a systum without removing it...what you put it you must take out wether it's uneaten or pooed out.
Just something to think about
I agree 110%.. Shallow for me and then clean every week or every other.. Whatever the specific tank calls for
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