Play sand leeching Kh

[anewbie]

Hare is the two things I left out in my post re Torpedo Beach sand. A finer sand becomes hard to vacuum because it is easy to suck out the sand and aleave the things I want to vacuum out. While I started with the sand in the Altum tank, it fairly quickly became my choice of sand in my pleco breeding and grow tanks, It is also in my shrimp tanks which may have lots of plants rooted in it as well. When I uses a thin layer I have the plants atahed to wood and rocks and also in pots.

Having used both crystal river and torpedo beach i'm going to disagree on this point; and since it sounds like you haven't used both i'm not sure you can comment. Also you keep pleco i keep dwarf cichild - your tanks are mostly bare and mine heavily planted. The difference is level of substrate penetration. As for torpedo beach vs hth pool filter sand - well if torpedo actually came from a beach you would expect it to be relatively warn smooth though in truth i found the pool fitler sand as smooth if not smoother so there is an aspect of disagreement - but while it is ok i still prefer the smaller grain crystal river.

Now i will admit the very fine moonshine is a PIA to vacuum as well as causing other issues due to dead zones in the substrate which can become quite nasty quite fast.

 

[TwoTankAmin34]

I was never a sand person until the Atums. I only have one tank with sand which has plants in the sand. Most of the tanks with sand and plants attached them to things or else I grow them in terracotta pots. While you are correct that my pleco tanks are not planted, but they are far from bare. The only bare bottom pleco breeding tank was my zebra pleco tank.

When I set it up I put in those plants to help with the cycle as a back-up. The plants came out several weeks later.

My method for keeping breeding plecos is to provide them with the maximum cover and caves as I can. Those two caves on the right on either side of the chunk of wood produced almost 500 fry over the years.

 

[galeslasher]

I just picked up some hth, it didn't seem harsh at all to me. Honestly the topsoil hurt my hands more than the sand, didn't cloud the water at all, didn't feel any sharper than play sand which does have some larger grains which are pretty abrasive. That said, I don't haveany bottom dwellers, just a rainbow shark, so I'm not super worried about any hurt bellies, but if others have burying fish with this stuff who don't mind it then I'll defer to their judgement.

Many are recommending black diamond blasting powder but the funny thing is this is actually the very first non gravel substrate I've used and there's a few reasons I moved away from it. I really didn't like the color, many say it makes the fish pop more but in my tanks it had the opposite effect, they darkened up against it and were very hard to see. It also is easily the most abrasive substrate I've ever used outside of the gravel and honestly, I think it's even more abrasive than that. Way more abrasive than the hth by a long shot. I hurt my own hands fiddling with the black diamond and digging around in the hth didnt do anything to my extremely thin skin (I've got broken collagen disorder) so while I'm sure it's true hth is probably more abrasive than actual aquarium sand designed for aquariums (and sold at a huge premium) it's the least abrasive I've used so far of all the cheap alternatives and I doubt I'll have any issues with it. The color is fine, I much prefer the beige over bright white or pure black. Brown would've been cool but I've already gotten two bags of this stuff and its a little darker than the pool sand which makes me very happy. Seeding it now in an empty tank and will be taking a looooong time slowly switching out the play sand for this stuff over the next few months.

Kh in all my play sand tanks is well over 6 and pH is super high, not what I want at all haha. Everyone seems mostly okay with it but I really want a controlled environment, not having something perpetually rising like that.