Sand Substrate

[LauraFrog]

There's a cycled 6 gal tank sitting on my desk with some platies in it (quarantine). As soon as they're cleared I want to redo it. The filtration is very good, about 10x/hour but I can push this up to 20x with a second filter. So I do plan on overstocking it, but not ridiculously so. The fish I want to use are a tiny native that prefers living in a school, Pseudomugil gertrudae. They're very pretty and I've managed to track down somebody selling them. I'll pay through the nose for them but oh well. I might put in 3 pygmy cories as well, but that will depend on how many blue eyes I can get and how the filter holds up.

I've got some wood and rock I want to use, and I've got an idea in my head for making that tank look absolutely spectacular, but I'm getting rather bored with pea gravel. I've used it for almost everything, so has everybody else, and if truth be known it's getting tired. I'd like to switch the tank over to sand when I strip it down. But I've been strongly advised against ever using sand by the owner of my LFS. I've learned that I can trust his advice. It's usually him that saves my ass (or my fish's) when somebody else has lied to me, misled me or pretended to know what they were talking about just to sell me something. He reckons that in every tank he's ever used it in, it's gone anaerobic and become a breeding ground for bacteria, wiped out the cycle, all the fish got sick and died, the live plants all carked it etc... it's not that he can't keep plants/fish, all his tanks look great. I think his main problem with it is that sand + undergravel = disaster and he uses undergravels on EVERYTHING, bettas in 'goldfish' bowls included.

If he says that it was an absolute disaster, I believe him but I see a lot of people using sand as a substrate very effectively. So what did he do wrong and how do I not do it wrong? Can I still grow live plants in sand? Most of the really nice planted tanks I've seen have used sand, but the only fertiliser I can get is liquid and it's a bit ridiculous to use CO2 to grow a few bunches of val in a 6 gallon tank. If you have to spend half your life maintaining it, I'll stick with pea gravel. I spend half my life staring at the big fish tank so I kind of need the other half for eating, sleeping and maintaining the big fish tank. Slack of me, I know. lol

 

[TylerFerretLord]

Sand can not be used with an undergravel filter, it just won't work. His tanks went kaboom because he didn't have a working filter, not because his sand 'went anaerobic'

Your fish will not die if the sand develops gas bubbles, the gas that we worry about that is toxic breaks down quickly when exposed to oxygen.

 

[Miss Wiggle]

agree totally with the above, I've run several tanks with sand with no problems, not once has it got anerobic or have bubbles caused any problems. I would challenge you to find one person with any genuine experiences of this.

sand doesn't work in undergravel filters, as above, no filter = disaster.... not sand = disaster.

 

[ALW]

no filter = disaster.... not sand = disaster.

no filter = BIG Disaster

 

[tenohfive]

I've always used gravel in the past and have set up my latest (dwarf cichlid) tank with sand...it looks fantastic. I'll be alot more careful not to overfeed as any excess food laying on the sand is more noticeable, but thats good housekeeping anyway.

Recommended, provided you use a filter.

 

[Honeythorn]

I've got sand in my 30 gal and have never used gravel in there. I've found that Hygrophillia Polysperma does excellently on sand, and also Aponogentons. Sand in a 6 gal should look very nice indeed.

 

[LauraFrog]

Okay thanks for the advice!

Trust me, this guy is no fraud. I'm sure he really did have a very bad experience with it. He never runs tanks on plain undergravels, but just about everything - from a tiny betta bowl to an 80 gal display he's setting up - has an undergravel, combined with various assemblies of power filters. Most of them are over filtered because he uses the right sized power filter to cope with the whole tank and then adds an undergravel as well. So it wasn't total lack of filtration that caused his sand tanks to crash. But I forgot to ask if he had undergravel plates under the sand. I dont' think he's stupid enough to do that, but if he did, could it have been muck stuck under the plates with little or no water flow that caused the tank to go down?

Other than that I just don't know. He reckons it's bad for live plants to use sand but I know that's crap because I've seen some really lovely planted tanks running on sand. He says the sand went rotten, that it stank and there was gas in it and the fish died and the plants died and the water went cloudy. But is there a possibility that the bacterial bloom came from something other than a mistake setting up the sand substrate?

I also have to ask him if he's done this more than once. If he killed a heap of fish trying sand and blamed the sand for it, it would be just like him to come out with "sand kills fish" and never try it again.

The other thing about sand is that it's free, I can go and pick it up and bring it home and boil it and chuck it in my tank. It's from a creek and most - hang on, all - of my tanks have rocks, gravel, wood, plants and even fish from the creek. I haven't had a problem with any of it. Gravel, on the other hand, is as expensive as hell and it's really annoying because it adds an extra $30 on the cost of setting up even a tiny tank like a 6 gal.

 

[TRDNiteLife]

The other thing about sand is that it's free, I can go and pick it up and bring it home and boil it and chuck it in my tank. It's from a creek and most - hang on, all - of my tanks have rocks, gravel, wood, plants and even fish from the creek. I haven't had a problem with any of it. Gravel, on the other hand, is as expensive as hell and it's really annoying because it adds an extra $30 on the cost of setting up even a tiny tank like a 6 gal.

Depending on what kind of gravel you want, I purchased mine at a local home improvement store. It was $3 for a 35 pound bag.

 

[Ficious]

gravel in my area is very cheap...3-5 bucks a bag and for a 30 lb bag its only like 10 bucks....a 6 gallon would only be about 2 small bags im sure

 

[LauraFrog]

You're lucky! Wish i could get it that cheap.