[Stoney Reef]

Will I have a DSB in my tank, what a PITA to clean out! The bottom sand is compacted etc etc. Plus following the think tank thread, I will never ever have another one! 1" of sand is all that will be in the bottom of my tank from now on!

 

[thefatman]

lolol well after hurting my brain reading the think tank thread, i've rethought the idea as well. i'm gonna shorten my cls returns in the bottom of the tank, and only put in about 2 inches of southdown, just enough to cover the returns .

and put in plenty of critters like crabs, sand stirrer stars, and possibly cukes as well.

so stoney....tell us how you REALLY feel

 

[Stoney Reef]

Ask my neighbors who are pounding on the door from the sand bed stench permeating the hall ways and the other apartments in the building! EEEEWWWWWWWWW! Next stop wal-mart and $30 in little renuzit jell airfreshners later!

 

[caesura]

Heck I am scared of an inch. I want the poop OUT of my system.

 

[Patman]

Thats funny. My tank was up for 3.5 yrs and I just had to move it due to remodeling. I had to take out about 50% of the sand bed and it just smelled like the ocean....no sulfur, no stench, etc. If we could only figure out all the variables...


Pat

 

[Jim_D]

Stoney Reef, what type of sand where you using and how long was the sand bed setup for?

I have helped move a 5 and a 7 year old DSB and the only smell that I smelt was a very slight odour from a portion of the black area of the 5 yo DSB but it wasnt offensive and certainly not anything that could have been smelled in the next room let alone neighbours.

 

[RWD]

Today I removed a 4-5" DSB from a 3 year old 22 gal refugium and it didn't smell bad at all. The top 2" were very dirty with a yellowish crap/detritus but below that it was very clean and white as the day I put it in. Don't know why yours smelled bad and was compacted ???

 

[asmith]

Lack of flow and critters will cause the problems that you describe. I will never set up a tank without a DSB. No filtration system is perfect for everyone. I have had great success with a DSB and I am going to stick with it.

Andrew

 

[Mrs Smith]

(Yeah, but I might not. I'm still on the fence with this one.)

 

[Jim_D]

The DSB recipe for marital bliss :funny: :funny:

 

[Stoney Reef]

90 gallon AGA with 2100 gph flow. Using caribsea sugar sized oolitic sand. Various spaghetti worms, nassarius snails etc etc! Found some dead cerith snails in the middle of the mess.

 

[Ray1214]

I guess because I set up my dsb with varying degrees of sizes. (IE, About 4 parts oolitic sand, 1-2 parts cc, 2 parts the super fine colored sand from caribsea), is why I don't seem to have much of a problem. I use the different degrees because I tend to like to keep Jawfish and like the color of the top layer.

Ray

 

[mjsandbe]

Patric sometimes I wonder about your luck. I have a 90, a 58, and a sump with DSP and they are all doing well. When I moved I even dug out the 90 DSB and threw it out because it had a crushed coral base and it did not smell too bad. None of them are hard(**** Clown for digging to prove it) or seem to have any other problems and they are all teeming with life.

Maybe your lights melted the sand together

 

[SouthernReefer]

well, i learned alittle leasson... completely bare bottom tanks are a pita to keep clean too..... it wasn't the fishpoo build up, it was all those little critters living in the liverocks that kept making most of the mess burrowing and ejecting their mess had created a sand like build up along the spraybar, and made the bottom of the tank unappealing to look at. so i had to add a patch of geo-marine crushed coral around the front and sides of the tank to fill in the void. looks better too!

 

[Stoney Reef]

I will use a 1" sand bed.

 

[tdwyatt]

Heh!!!

180 gal system with 16cm DSB (no Plenum) and sump with same...6 years and a few months, Prop tank system 3 yrs +, both came down without anything but ocean smells and the sand in the 180 is white below the first 3 to 4 cm (a little grey to yellow trash in the top layers)... No bad smells, no problems with cyano, although I have had a small patch o cyano now with the 180 as of late (it is being ignored a bit while I get it ready to move into the new 180 system). I have seen systems with the black spots, but those systems were usually those with heavy feeding regimens.

I have never had problems with them. I Just set up a new stony reef top biotope with 12cm bed (my only concession to the Spankster was 4cm less sand... ) and will move the 6 yr old system into a 125 lagoonal system with a dsb as well. I may use a remote DSB and settling tank for the Stony system in additiion to the DSB in it now. Prop system already has a maturing DSB that is 12 cm deep, and it will be the only system I consider removing the sand from, but that is because the whole tank is long, wide, and shallow (only 15 inches deep!)

Keep in mind that if you keep the husbandry up and export nutrients, the sand beds can have long life expectancies.

I would not have taken down the DSB in Wellford were it not for the fact that we have moved (although there have been a few probs there due to some neglect... )

 

[Stoney Reef]

Initially I would say I fed heavily, but there towards the end, the fish had to jump out of the tank, run over and tap me on the shoulder and jump back into the tank to get fed! I dunno; I guess, between the 55 gallon with a DSB being defunct, the 90 gallon in the same situation, and a 58 with a perfectly good DSB, I guess I am just going to set up the next 58 gallon with 1" of sand.