Replacing my sand bed
 

Hello, I have a 230 gallon reef aquarium. My sand bed is approximately 1 inch deep and consists of very fine sand. I have read previous posts that people have replaced their sand with the coarser sand with no harm to the fish or coral. I want to replace my sand bed with a coarser sand because my MP 40s and MP 10s are stirring up the sand so bad that a lot of my live rock is covered in white sand and there are several bare spots on the bottom of the aquarium.

I plan on siphoning out the sand and some water into 5 gallon pails. I only plan on taking out at the most 40 gallons of water because that is all I have on hand in my water change container. I was going to put the new sand back in by pouring it down a 3 inch PVC pipe so that my aquarium water would not get that cloudy and the sand should settle quicker I hope.

My questions are:
Can someone recommend a replacement sand that will not get blown around by the MP 40s.
Do I buy normal sand or live sand.
Do I have to do anything special to the sand before I put it into the aquarium or do I just rinse it off with RO/DI water.

Thanks in advance

Rick

Size of grain will depend entirely on your setup and how much flow hits the bottom.
Regular sand is fine.
Rinsing with tap water might be easier, use buckets in the bath tub.

The plan looks good, but when I did this, I took out a third every other week. Let the new sand colonize a bit instead of a complete removal at once.

I did the same as brad

I did it in three water changes a 1/3 at a time

I bought coarse from big Al's can't remember the name but it was dry not live
I rinsed in a colander and put in. Doing this aloud any Bacteria in sand to transfer to new sand

Good luck

Thank you for the quick reply. I will do the same and only replace 1/3 of my sand every week. I will take a look at big Al's to see what type of sand they have

It's in the center isle on a pallet. FYI