Ways to get rid of Detrius

[daniel5455]

Any suggestion on what i can do to clean the sand bed and Live rocks to remove all the Detrius. I would rather buy a fish or animal rather than siphoning it out.

thanks

 

[Phyl]

Use a turkey baster and blow it into the water column. It should get skimmed or filtered out from there. Otherwise you can look to sand cleaners and snails to solve your problem. As many snails as I have I still end up with plenty of ditritus in the rocks and the turkey baster is the only thing I've found to help.

 

[revhtree]

Agree with Phyllis. There is not any one thing that will remove all the deitrus. Snails/crabs will eat some of it, but the rest will have to be blown around, filtered out, and siphoned out.

 

[daniel5455]

I thought that if you blow it around you can cause nitrite or nitrate spikes?

 

[AndyH5512]

It is already in your water, just not floating around. I wouldnt stir up my entire sand bead all at once, but blowing the detritus off rocks a little at a time will not hurt, it will help. be sure to kep up with your watcer changes as well, that helps prevent spikes.

 

[Phyl]

The filter feeders in my system love it. I always blow it around at the end of a feeding to make sure to stir it all back up again. My nitrates are undetectable. Same theory as a bare bottom tank, if you think about it. The whole thing with BB is that you have MAD flow in your tank that suspends any detritus until it can be used or skimmed/filtered out. The only think different here is the frequency of the dustings.

 

[HoopsGuru]

I do the same things with the turkey baster, and do a water change at the same time. You should be doing regular ones anyway, so I blow up the detritus right before hand which makes it easy to siphon without having to dive into the tank.