Thinking Of Changing To Sand.

[dthoffsett]

I have a 75gal tank set up with 150lbs of rock. It currently has crushed coral for substrate approximately 1/2" deep, with the rocks on the bare tank glass. I was thinking of switching to crushed coral sand so they can dig in it. The question I have is do you guys think I should just add sand and mix it up, or change it out completely. And how would I go about doing that with such a large tank, I really don't want to take all of the rock out, and I would prefer to leave the fish in. The current substrate is too heavy to syphon out, so I'd have to do it all by hand. Any and all suggestions are welcome.

Here's a pic of the substrate, with a two inch juvie for reference

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[adambrum]

Im in the middle of doing this at the moment, dont mix the 2 it makes it very hard to clean as the gravel vac needs to go into the gravel which will suck up all the sand.

one other thing i brought carib sea aragmax sand expensive BUT its a real pain to clean but the up side is a perfect ph of 8.3 if the ph drops it dissolves the calcium a bit which brings up the ph clever stuff !


You would be better removing the rocks to give it a good clean and it will make getting the gravel out easier.

Good luck

 

[Ferris]

I did this fairly recently in my 125 gal. I removed all the decor and then the substrate half a tank at a time and the fish used the other half - just scooped out the black sand that was in there with a large net. Once one half was done, i moved to the other side and the fish did the same.

I just repeated this method when adding the new sand - whole thing took less than 2 hours and the fish didn't seem particularly bothered.

If you don't want to remove the rocks, i guess you could stack them in the half where the fish are while you clear the other half in the same way as the substrate. I would be tempted to take them out though, the water's going to get pretty cloudy while you're doing this and you don't want to put a rock on a fish by accident.

 

[dthoffsett]

Oh yuck, I was afraid of that. It took me forever to get the rocks set the first time. Oh well, such is the life of the mbuna keeper. Adambrum, I may try out the aragmax, my water is naturally around 8.3 out of the tap, but is low in kh, hence the crushed coral, I've got some in the filter but more is always good.