Converting established gravel tank to sand tank

[grattu]

Anyone have any experience with this? I already have gravel substrate in my tank with fish, but I want to change to white sand because I think it looks better. My plan is to take all of my fish out and leave them in a bucket with the old tank water next time I do a water change, drain all of the remaining water, take out the gravel and then add the new sand.

I was thinking about adding some plants as well, but I don't know much about plants and whether sand is good for plants. Any thoughts or advice on this would be helpful

 

[Angela1108]

Plants work well with sand. What light do you have? Sword, crypts and anubias are usually good starter plants. You will just want to make sure to add root tabs especially if you get a sword

And that's what we did when we switched out small tank. Just make sure to really rinse the sand well. You also might want to take a stocking/nylon and put some of the old gravel in there and leave it in the tank for like a week then pull it out. A lot of good bacteria is in the gravel and having some still in the tank will help the good bacteria make its way to the sand


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[SFAquariums1]

There is virtually no beneficial bacteria in your water column, so what I would do is when doing a water change, keep about 10 gallons of the old water. Put the fish into one of the buckets with an air stone for some water movement. Drain the rest of your water out. Scoop some of the gravel out and put in a bucket (if cleaned and dried properly you can re use it in another tank). Keep a small amount of gravel in the bottom and cover it with sand (this will help seed yor new substrate with beneficial bacteria. Again, not much but that combined with the beneficial bacteria in your filter will be plenty. Once sand is in, set up your hard scape (rocks, driftwood, etc) and refill the tank with de chlorinated water. Once the tank is refilled and filters and heater are plugged back in, wait until the temperate is back up to what you want it at and re add your fish. If the fish are sensitive, I would drip acclimate them to the new water.

As far as live plants go, you can do most of them with sand, some of the higher light plants may need to have some liquid fertilizers added but if you start with anything like Java moss, Christmas moss, water sprite or wisteria, and most anubias, you can put 1 root tab in the center of tank and they'll do fine. The lighting would be more important, however what so have just listed is relatively low light stuff.


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[grattu]

The lights I have are led lights that came with the hood

 

[ywagner]

K I actually did this successfully with keeping all my fish and bacteria. So what I did was empty out half the gravel one day, and another the next. Then I added the sand, as simple as that. No need to get rid of fish, it will just cause more stress


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