Late Night Tank Maintenance...

[jgiannini]

So....Last night I thought it was a good idea to start changing out the sand bed in my tank. I wasn't happy with the bed after the first month, but I stuck with it anyway. I originally had in there some larger grain Caribsea Aragonite in a 1" or so shallow bed.

So a couple months ago I bought about 90 lbs. of Caribsea sugar sand and finally decided to swap it out. I decided to do about 1/2 the tank in the first pass to try to keep parameter fluctuations to a minimum. But as always, here's the problem. I thought I rinsed the sand pretty good, but when dumping it into the tank, got a wicked storm of silt, etc. that covered everything in the tank. Luckily I don't have too much livestock/corals in the tank, so not worried about that (which is why I chose now to do it). The real question is on equipment. My skimmer and HOB fuge pulled in a lot of the silt/dust. Should I go through the exercise of pulling all the pumps out and the skimmer body to wash it totally out? Or do you think with all the flow through the skimmer it will be ok?

I think for round 2 I will rinse the sand 2-3 times as much as well as either try the PVC pipe/funnel trick or the ziploc bag trick.

Thanks for reading!

Jason

 

[stingythingy45]

I don't think it would cause any trouble with your skimmer of pumps/fug.
Most likely you'll have some of the heavier residue down at the bottom of the bubble chamber.But,that's just about it.
I'm surprised you didn't just pull the rocks,and change out the sand bed all in one shot.I think it would have been much easier on both you and the tank.

 

[jgiannini]

Yeah....I am sort of kicking myself today for not doing it all at once. Would be easier to have 1 huge storm instead of 2. I had received 2 different recommendations on this...one was to do 1/2 of the tank to try to avoid any re-cycling, etc. and the other to do it all in one shot. I guess this is live and learn lesson #57 on reefkeeping.... I'll look at my skimmer tonight when I get home and see what kind of crud it has in it.

Jason

 

[stingythingy45]

Yeah....I am sort of kicking myself today for not doing it all at once. Would be easier to have 1 huge storm instead of 2. I had received 2 different recommendations on this...one was to do 1/2 of the tank to try to avoid any re-cycling, etc. and the other to do it all in one shot. I guess this is live and learn lesson #57 on reefkeeping.... I'll look at my skimmer tonight when I get home and see what kind of crud it has in it.

Jason

I used to think that a cycle could be caused by changing out the complete sand bed.But,not anymore since I've done it a few times now.I think you're more apt to have problems disturbing 1/2 the sand bed and then not removing it all.Most of the bio-filtration is on or in the LR anyways.
No biggie if you have a little white mud at the bottom of the skimmer.I have mini-feather dusters,coralline and all types of stuff encrusted and at the bottom of my skimmer.I just make sure the cone and collection cup are clean.

 

[jgiannini]

Maybe I will try to do the rest of the tank tonight after the lights go off. Just gotta make sure I clean the aragonite some more....

Jason