1350 Gallon Reef

[mr.wilson]

Originally Posted by KevinK

Mr Wilson,

what substrate is there in the main tank, and how thick,

it seems very course and as far as my understanding goes' thy always say course material will trap a lot of debris.-- what's the background on this ?

I also se there is a DSB in the refugium what's the grade there

thanks

We started off with a mixed grade and scraped the small stuff we had initially. The fine stuff gets swept up into the cleaning magnets too easily. The surge in flow moves some sand around, so we add course (grape size) aragonite where the sand tends to shift.

I like course substrate because it turns pink with coraline algae and provides good tunneling for gobies and jawfish. It also provides better homes for zooplankton. Fine sand simply cannot support large colonies of copepods and amphipods.

We used regular fine sand in the refugium because it was more for bacteria and we needed to use it somewhere. I like the look of mixed sand with shells. The regular stuff is too homogenous and looks like cat litter