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Replacing sand idea

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live sand
10K views 9 replies 8 participants last post by  JohnWesolowski 
#1 ·
Hi :wavey:! I'm currently having about 3 inches of live sand in my 125gl for about 2yrs now. The sand is included with the tank when i bought it, it has a dark color and pretty big in size so i dont really like it.
Now i have some bags of live sands that i got from petco and not sure how to replace it? Im thinking scooping the old sand out and slowly place the new sand in. I know the tank will be cloudy if i do that but i guess it might take only one night for it to settle.
Pros & Cons? or any better way i can do? Thanks :D
P/S.. i think i can only replace the sand that is in front of the tank and not the back because it's almost impossible for me to move all the rocks and corals around and reach back.
 
#2 ·
After 2 yrs there is probably a lot of detritous trapped down in that sand. I don't know an easy way to swap it out with out creating a huge mess. I would put the coral and rock into plastic tubs with as much tank water as possible, make up another 50 gallons of new then take out the old sand, lay in the new and wet it back down with the new water. place a bowl on the sand so as to minimize disturbance. Good Luck
 
#4 ·
After 2 yrs there is probably a lot of detritous trapped down in that sand. I don't know an easy way to swap it out with out creating a huge mess. I would put the coral and rock into plastic tubs with as much tank water as possible, make up another 50 gallons of new then take out the old sand, lay in the new and wet it back down with the new water. place a bowl on the sand so as to minimize disturbance. Good Luck
Well i dont really need to replacing the whole tank with the new sand, do I? I just want to replace the sand that is visible and in front of the tank to make the tank look brighter because my old sand right now is too dark.
 
#5 ·
I did it, but I did it over a 2-3 month period. I would siphon as much out as I could during water changes. Then when I got 95% of it out I added the new sand. It was a very slow process, but everything went smooth. You could probably speed it up if you did mare water changes, but I wasn't in a hurry. You also have to be careful about your rock, my rock was on the glass so I wasn't worried, but if your rock is on the sand itself I wouls adive against this method.
 
#8 ·
I changed half of mine so far in about two or three months slowly, trust me it gets really messy and cloudy... I did mine with each water change, slowly removing some with each change. I lost my acan in the change out so far. "dead" The slower the better, Doug suggested a great way to do it if you in a rush. I'm still not done switching mine out.
 
#10 ·
Live Sand Replacement

This advice is a little late, but might help others in the future.

I replaced the live sand in the left one-third of my 40 gallon tank. I used a rectanglular plastic food container about 5 inches wide to remove the old sand. The problem was that the water in the sand was dark green, and my nitrates spiked.

I'm using another approach to replace the remaining two-thirds. I got 5/8ths inch tubing to siphon out the sand. This sucks up everything, and does so very quickly. I clear an area of shells & rocks, then siphon the sand until the 2 gallon bucket is filled. Don't forget to put back any snails or hermits that go a ride down the siphon tube. I then replace with 2 gallons of salt water. I've been doing this every 4 or 5 days. I have to do this one more time before I actually move the corals and live rock into a holding bucket while I vacuum out the rest of the sand, and put in the "new" live sand.

This is working much better than the first one-third I did last month.
 
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