Deep Sand in Fresh Water Tanks?

[DeeDeeK]

I have a friend who has been in the hobby for forty years and he uses three at a bare minimum to five inches of this really nice rive sand with smooth, rounded grains that don't pack very tightly. He doesn't have problems with poisons burping up out of the sand. His water quality is always excellent at 0nh3, 0no2, and like 5no3. He plants his aquaria heavily and only uses mechanical filtration with filters rated for half the tank they're hanging from, and does few water changes.

His tanks are clear and beautiful, with very very few sick fish ever.

I'm running a FW tank now with 3" river sand, many plants, and california blackworms, MTS, and a harmless species of planaria roaming around cleaning and oxygenating the sand as they disturb it. Well, the planaria don't disturb much at only 1cm long maximum. I'm chicken and use a 20 or 30 gph filter, for approx. 10gal, full of sintered-glass media and some poly-fil.

My tank is beautiful, clear, and has no ammonia or nitrites at all and about 5-10ppm nitrates. I know I overfeed some (I also overeat, go figure) though I'm trying to resist. It's got a lot of fish in it, too.

I'm going to remove a few pieces of bio media from the filter every few days until I have none in maybe three weeks time. Then I'll see if my friend's magic approach works for me.

He claims nitrates are reduced in the sand, too!

Does anybody have any experience with this approach working for them? My friend just smiles and chuckles when I ask him about how it can work!

Anyone else farting around with deep sand? Adding critters was inspired by marine tanks' living sand. Anyone out there trying the same thing?

I'm really into learning alternate approaches to mainstream fishkeeping. It would be pretty cool to learn of some other people's experience and knowledge in that area.