aquarium substrate

[newkidfish]

My daughter is wishing to set up a marine aquarium and after reading several books and visiting several specialist stores we have purchased a tank, fliters, lighting etc....
We were offered two types of substrate in the shop for the aquarium, one an artificial marine granual (forgive me I cant recall the name) or a coral sand in 25kg bag.

The books we have give conflicting information as to how to install the sand, should it be washed first? And if so should I use tap water or RO water?

Or should it be put in the aquarium unwashed?
The chap at shop was unclear...can you help? :?

 

[Meloco14]

:welcome:

Well honestly there are a lot of different views about substrate. If you search the forums here you will see that some people prefer a deep sand bed of very fine grain sand, some prefer a very shallow sprinkling of crushed coral, some prefer a bare glass bottom, and the growing trend is using a faux sand bed with a material such as starboard. The best bet would be for you to read up on the pros and cons of each method and decide for yourself. Each method works. As to which works best is a tough question to answer. In your reading I am sure you learned about the nitrogen cycle. A deep sand bed with areas of no or very low oxygen is very good for denitrification. However, some people think that a deep sand bed will over time accumulate too much detritus and will start producing large amounts of nitrate. For this reason some will use a shallow bed or no bed so they can siphon out detritus easily. But of course, you lose a significant amount of denitrification. As far as washing sand, I normally rinse it in a bucket with freshwater. The first few rinses I use tap and the final one or two I will use RO. If you have enough RO you might as well use it for all the rinses. As far as your concerns about not knowing aquarium jargon and abbreviations, go to the Library link at the top of the page and you will find a page of commonly used abbreviations and acronyms. Hope this helps.

 

[newkidfish]

Thanks for the advice,
I will tell my daugter to use the tap water as advised and then use RO for final rinsing...as we have to travel quite far to get the RO water.

I will also pass on your comments about the depth of sand etc to my daughter. thanks for the advice.

 

[Anonymous]

No matter how much you rinse, you will still get fine particles clouding the tank when it is first set up. Don't worry, they will settle after a new days. I actually don't rinse sand for a new set up very much. In fact I have put it into the tank dry, added a small amount of water to cover it and left things to get throughly soaked for 72 hours before adding the rest of the water.

This wasn't an original idea on my part, it was suggested to me by Anthony Calfo (if you don't know him, he is a well known reefkeeping author). It's his contention that the finer particles do no harm, and in fact help to establish the bacterial population in a DSB.