Sand bed indecision...

[asylumdown]

Deep sand bed. No wait, bare bottom. No, no wait, shallow sand bed. Hmmm, maybe still a deep sand bed? Argh. Why is there no right answer?

I'm trying to decide how much sand to put in the tank that's in my sig line. I want to do it right, and I have no ability to make a remote DSB with this set up.

Instead of writing an annotated bibliography that's due Monday, I've spent hours and hours reading about sand beds, pros and cons, people's opinions (which are usually presented as holy fact), and in a few cases horror stories. Here's what I've aggregated:

1. The people who've had horror 'my sand bed killed my tank' stories all seem to have had really very deep sand beds, like 8 inches plus.

2. Some people swear by them

3. Some people swear by not having them

4. Some people are really mean when other people have an opinion that is different than theirs.

At first I was just going to put a 1.5-2 inch layer of sand in my display tank then never think about sand again. Then I read that 1-3 inches is the worst idea possible because you're half way between a deep and shallow bed with neither full benefits but full drawbacks of both. Then I read that 2 inch sand beds are just fine. Then I read that putting a DSB in a your DT is just asking for trouble. Then I read that people who've put DSB in their DT have never, ever had problems with nitrate.... Le Sigh.

Here's what I was thinking of doing:

in the display tank, putting a 3 inch layer of sugar grained sand in, then putting another inch of fiji pink on top of it. It's not the deepest bed out there, but might still fill that role without (hopefully) most of the badness?

What do you guys think?