Turkey Baster and sandbed

[canadianbudz604]

Does anyone use a turkey Baster to clean their sand? Lately I've been just sucking up maybe an 1/8 deep or 1/4 deep of the sand to keep it sparkly white. I do have a fighting conch but it is lazy as all hell and doesn't do much. I just suck it up it and blow it back out into nice piles. Is this a good habit or bad? What do you guys think? My sandbed is maybe 2 inches deep. I have hermit crabs and nassarius but they don't seem to keep it clean as I want. The crabs are too busy fighting each other anyways. Thanks

[spit.fire]

Gravel vac, that way you remove the nutrients instead of putting them in the water

[mike31154]

Don't have a sump so I use the baster just before water change. This way the nasty stuff gets sucked out of the display with the siphon/vac thingy. I also jam the vac down into the substrate to stir things up.

If your procedure of stirring with the baster & simply making new piles hasn't caused your livestock to suffer ill effects, I guess you're ok. Skimmer will likely pull much of whatever you stir up eventually.

[Bblinks]

I do it all the time, however I do have a filter sock on the system.

[canadianbudz604]

I was using filter floss, but I took it out recently. I don't go too deep into the sand, so it doesn't seem to bother any of the corals. I wish I could vacuum my sand but my tank is too packed with corals. I do use a small hose to suck out cyano and things like that. My tank is also sumpless. The turkey Baster just kind of stirs the top 1/8 so it's all clean. I also just do it maybe 2 or 3 times a week

[Bblinks]

I would put a bag on it when ever you blow the sand bed then take it off after a couple of hours.