Adding 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.

Asbestos

Aquarium Advice Activist
Joined
Oct 7, 2009
Messages
124
Location
AZ
So i picked up some Quickcrete medium sand for my tank, now i have a question about adding it. How is the best way to clean it. Also this is for my 10g tank and eventual my larger tank, so my main question is, i currently have gravel in my tank and a established filter, but the filter is a crappy one should i wait until i can pick up a liquid test kit and a better filter before changing the substrate.
 
Can anyone tell me if replacing the substrate will just cause massive amounts of problems, and fish deaths?
 
Would be best to wait until you have a test kit, its not uncommon to have a mini cycle after a substrate change. You will want to be able to monitor that. You should probably get a prefilter for your filter as well, so that dust particles wont cause it to malfunction.
 
Depending on where the sand comes from, concrete sand may also increase your KH & pH. This may not be a problem, esp. if you ahve mod hard water to start with. However, it would be safer to have the sand in a bucket of water for a week or so & test for any parameter shifts.

You want to really clean out the sand well, or you will have lots of dust in the water. What I did was to put the sand in a bucket, fill with water & stir. Anything that floats I skim out (mostly organics, bits of leaves, etc.) Then I put a small amount in a fine sieve, and run the garden hose over it. Giving each batch of sand a good rinse & stir (and watering my garden at the same time.) That gets rid of most of the fines. <Even then, having a prefilter will help protect your pump/filter from any fine sand that remains.>
 
Please,be careful. Several years ago I had a nice size tank and added some great substrate and didnt know how to go about cleaning it and it did kill a bunch of my fish. All but crushyfish, he's a tough fish.Thanks
 
I am waiting to acquire a good liquid test kit before I change the substrate.
 
I haven't had any issues with the Quickrete medium sand. It's pretty clean out of the bag. Put some in a bucket and run water through it until the water comes out of the bucket clear. Should only take about 15 minutes for the medium sand.

Keep the established filter on the tank and put some of the gravel in a cup and put the cup in the tank after you change the substrate. This will help seed the sand and keep the cycle from crashing too badly. If you get a new filter, run it on the tank with the old filter for a couple weeks to seed the new filter.

Good call on getting a good liquid test kit. I've had no problems with my API FW Master kit.

One more thing, if you're going to sand, look at gettting some Malaysian trumpet snails (MTS). They burrow through the sand and keep it from going anaerobic. If the sand goes anaerobic (starts turning black), it's building up gas, I think hydrogen sulfide, which can kill the fish if released. If you don't want the snails, you'll have to stir the sand up once a week.
 
Back
Top Bottom