Sand bed maintenance in a nano?
 

I've got a 28g nanocube I've had up and running about 14 months now. I havent' ever vacuumed my sand bed, have stirred it up a few times moving rock work or just to mix things up occasionally but thats the extent. My current set up wouldn't allow me to really vacuum much of it due to rock placement, but i could likely stir it up more frequently. Should I be doing this, or just leave things be? I've got 1 - 1 1/2 inch sandbed I would say.....

Any advice from the lil reef keepers?

My display is a little over 2 years old. I never vacuumed my sand bed ever. My trick is during a water change, stir up a little part of your sand bed, siphon as much of that dusty water out to do your water change. After that i dump twice as much kz coral snow into the tank than normal. Helps the skimmer catch all the small particles.

You can disregard my post if you want as my tank is a little bigger than a nano. But if you have a sufficient amount of flow to keep your detritus suspended in your water column, there's really no reason to be touching your sandbed. The more you keep your hands out of your tank the better. It's just my opinion and there's a lot out there that would disagree. And I have very little clean up crew and they're never on the sandbed anyways. I do have a diamond headed goby that stirs up the sand but he never really leaves his favourite hang out spot which is quite small

Well I think i have good flow, I use a wave maker alternation about every 30 seconds and seems to give good motion in the ocean lol

Coral snow - sounds interesting, I feel like I have always had too much particulate in my water from day one and have tried a few different things to deal with it with no good results - could this be a solution??

Coral snow is awesome. Works great and is a very popular additive.

Stir
 

+1 on the stirring, I do this and my sand bed is usually always nice and white.

I had a multiple ranged depth sandbed in my 33 gallon I never touched it never had any issues and even though I had a large CuC however they rarely touched the sand.

It is for the most part a personal choice but I would say don't worry about it the sandbed isn't all that deep and it won't cause you that much of an issue my sand bed was 4 inches deep on one end and less than an inch on the other end never gave me any grief and the tank was heavily stocked

I'd recommend at least stirring up and siphoning out the detritus with water changes. Sandbeds will be able to buffer against a certain amount of decay but only up to a point. Eventually a calcium carbonate sandbed will lose it's ability to adsorb nutrients and will need to be replaced. Cleaning it out will help extend the useful life of it.
Greg

Can you please refer me to a link where this claim is justified/proved? I never heard of sand bed buffering/has the ability to buffer/absorb nutrients......

http://www.thereeftank.com/forums/f6...ed-160389.html

Some pretty lengthy reading material. Post #42 starts the chat about CaCO3 being a phosphate binder. Took me a few days to get through it all but there is a table of contents for convenience.

If you think about it calcium carbonate sand (aragonite) is the same material as live rock right? Calcium carbonate. Live rock binds phosphates and we need to "cook" it if the live rock was previously in a high nutrient situation. The sand binds phosphates in the same way. Unfortunately we can't cook the sand to remove them.

Interesting quote from that thread which explains what happens when you cook live rock:
"the bacteria in the LR are able to break off the bound phosphates that are attached to the calcium carbonate. (i will hunt down the references for this, though it may be more reading for you all). they then incorporate it into their bodies and bind it. the more phosphates the more bacteria bodies. if you get enough bacteria together they can create a fair amount of force. this force pushes the dead bacterium (bacterial flock) out of the LR where it can then be swept away from the LR. this bacterial flock is heavier then water so it falls to the bottom, or if your water flow is strong enough it can get pushed around until 1) it gets removed by the skimmer or 2) settles somewhere. either in a hard to reach low flow area or your sump/fuge. if this is planned then it is all good. if you have more sand in these areas then not so good. the force that the bacteria exert is known as Turgor. this makes LR self cleaning when it comes to phosphates.

this also can occur in the sand, but the problem with sand is that it is contained on every side but the top. so the bacterial flock formed from the LR and the sand just keeps building up in the sand bed till it just gets full. at the point the turgor is pushing the flock up into the water column is when you are able to get phosphate readings from the test kits".

Greg