making my own live sand

The friendliest place on the web for anyone with an interest in aquariums or fish keeping!
If you have answers, please help by responding to the unanswered posts.

foma2000

Aquarium Advice Freak
Joined
Nov 13, 2004
Messages
325
Location
santa cruz california
so i want to start to produce my own live sand and sell it to the lfs. ive been keeping severaly large (700+ gal) saltwater aquariums but i can never find cheep live sand. recently i whent to the local sand and gravel company and found really nice bright white sand. and i have one of those really long big tanks to set my operation up in. so a cupple questions for all you experts.
1) whats the best way to get pods and other creatures in the sand? i want to sell sand with lots of life in it.
2) how should it be packeged? i figure i can just put it in large plastic bags but will this be enough? do i need to keep it at a certain temp? and are there any other special packaging needs that i might need to face?
 
did your lfs tell you they'd buy ls from you? That's pretty cool if they did.
 
they didn't actualy say they would buy it from me no. but theve bought stuff from me befor and im sure that if i produced and packeged it profesionaly, maby with some nice bags they would buy it from me. same as any other supplier
 
I would probally ask them before you go out and take the time to make it all. Unless I guess your planning on selling it to other individuals (i.e. ebay, message boards, etc.)
 
A suggestion on how to package - get one of those vacuum sealers that you see on the tv infomercials. You could probably easily do 20lbs or so per bag. You could use the seal only function and not actually vacuum the air out. The bags are pretty sturdy and you would be sure they wouldn't accidently open.
 
I wouldn't worry too much about packaging. First find out if they will in fact buy live sand from you. If you package the sand to sit on shelves, it will become dead sand (NH3 bomb) by the time someone buys it. Think about selling in bulk to the lfs and also find out if they have the room and setup to store and keep the sand alive.

About pods... see if you can buy some LS from a pod populated tand from a member here. That should seed your sand and they will reproduce in no time. If not, I know you can order bottled pods online.

good luck
 
i like the vacum bag sealer thing. and yah. i should probably go make shure thell buy it from me befor i do anything, but if they dont, i can allways sell it somewhere else. i have a really populated tank already set up that i could probably take some rocks from so i think thats how ill get my pods. but how long will the ls stay in one of those bags?
 
i wouldnt think too long. maybe you could do like "made to order" to guarantee freshness and more available life than pre-packaged brands. That might be a good selling point. Hey, I'd buy some :)
 
Back
Top Bottom