beach sand as a substrate

[Annie/Aggie]

Hi, I have bought aquarium sand that's blue for my 10 gal, it looks great but now I want "beach" colored sand for a smaller tank. I am unable to find the color I want but purchased beach sand for my grandkids sand box that is the right color. I have now been boiling some of it for about 5 hours and am going to do some tests on it shortly. My question, Is there any known reason why I absolutely should NOT do this? Has anyone else tried it?

 

[Roach182]

There could be a lot of crushed shell in it that could mess with you water parms.

 

[Annie/Aggie]

thanks, that's why I'm asking because I never intended it for an aquarium and so didn't check it's composition.

 

[Andyvette]

thanks, that's why I'm asking because I never intended it for an aquarium and so didn't check it's composition.

Raised pH is definately a possible concern, but I would be concerned with how fine beach sand is..... it seems like it would cloud your water easily when you move anything or vacuum. Pool Filter Sand is the recommendation here, in that it is a light color (similar to beach), and heavier... little to no cloud, and you can actually stick your vaccuum in the sand with little to no loss of sand.


Edited to say:
Oh yeah... and Gig'em

 

[An t-iasg]

Agree with the above statements - beach sand or playsand is too fine for FW tanks and may alter your parameters. You could put some sand in a cup of tap water for a few days and then do pH, GH, and KH tests on the water in the cup. These test results should still be the same as your tap water tests. If anything changed - for example, the pH rose - then unless this is an African cichlid tank, you would not want your substrate altering your parameters. To do this test accurately, you would also want to do a "control" test on your tap water. Pour a glass of water and let it sit out for 24 hours. Do the pH, GH, and KH tests on the tap water. Compare these results with the sand and cup water results. They should be the same. If not, the sand is altering the water parameters.

I just found some pool filter sand. I went around to a few pool supply places last week and asked them for a cup of pool filter sand. I then added the water to it and did my testing. All the pool filter sand that I got was inert; it didn't change the water parameters, but I liked the looks of one over the other, so I'm going to get that one.

 

[DeathWarp]

pool filter sand is great, I will 100% agree with going that route

 

[Annie/Aggie]

hello people, I now consider all of you as sanity savers! Thank you, I'm really glad I asked here because I was in fact having a heck of a time getting the play sand to settle!. It came clean enough but seemed very easily messed as Andyvette noted. I went right out and got pool filter sand, perfect color and not a bit of cloud. I picked up a handy hint on`` changing out your substrate`` here and used a 2 litre bottle to put it in with. Also a great idea. Anyway, 100% successful and I got the color I wanted at a greatly reduced price. thank you, hopefully there will finally come a time when I can help others here.

 

[An t-iasg]

I'm glad it worked out for you!