[brandon429.2.0]

Team, it will be fun to manage a work thread at TRT involving anything you want with your sand.


*if your sandbed is running perfectly as is, do nothing



but if you have a home move coming up

or a tank blending...upgrade where you move all inhabitants over and you want to skip the new tank cycle

post those jobs up. we will easily guide them into complete after pics and nothing will die, there's some fascinating new science out there that assists in tank transfers and anything involving your filters and or sand

post away. post up your cyano/dino problem tanks if you want, anything with sand where action is needed. can do
if you want more sand, less sand, to change it all for something new


this wont be an experiment with your tank...it will be a continuance of jobs we've already logged in several places on the web. TRT needs one in my humble op

we can do any blend or move job you want without a recycle... without buying bottle bac, without tedious testing. there's an order of ops that copies into all reefs, we just run it.

who's up

 

[brandon429.2.0]

First job, a relay from reef2reef we just closed it out now, Chrisjj625 was willing to share testimonial and pic follow up I can relay as we track outcomes from sandbed work.


Here is a full reef we just removed the whole sandbed all at once, he's doing the light re ramping phase currently and feeding the corals well (light intensity drop prevents bleaching)

I'll get before pics with the sand to post soon, just got these updates here after re assembly without sand.

 

[brandon429.2.0]

this tank job is a continuance of several current jobs and we can do many here at trt just the same.


Here was the details of his, and all sand removals in reefing, it’s not like the rules used to be:

-note
nothing i post is within the rules...it’s not to make flame it’s to show how today’s tank needs require new rules. By running thousands of remote jobs and getting instant win-fail feedback we have carved a rock solid method, am relaying that here. We aren’t in the discovery phase, that was 2008. This is more like job # 1500 and most are logged online start to finish in the sand rinse thread at rtr.



The old reef procedure rules and even BRS have rules about instant sandbed removal...it turned out bad for them when sandbeds were removed all at once vs ramped down in the usual way (small amounts removed vs all at once, to allow bacteria time to ramp up on new surfaces, mass translocation)

however there’s a need.

when people move homes they want it moved, and some folks noticed along the way in partial sandbed removals that the waste destratification was causing bad algae issues right before they moved.

so we blended the two options: in my sand threads and home relocation threads we disassemble reefs in order to have fish, rocks and corals away from the bed when it’s disturbed. They’re held in clean totes of water.

then the dirty water reef is taken down, rinsed out. The sand is either removed altogether, instantly, or if someone wants to keep sand and just clean it they rinse in tap water for hours until it’s clear. Then RO water, then the rinsed sand is ready for re use.


Im leading this thread with a sand removal job for a reason: if the first sps reef you see on file was instantly de bedded, then what does it matter if we tap rinse the sandbed from one, it’s lesser of an insult than removing the sand altogether.
but the tap rising statement gets the hottest flame responses it sounds ludicrous indeed. Seen in the context of total removal, simple cleaning jobs won’t stand out so badly now.

Welcome to the concept that sandbed bacteria simply do not matter in reefing, and at no time does bacterial mass trans locate onto live rocks as once thought, it doesn’t occur.

what does occur is live rocks are such strong surface area and in such a high contact zone for wastewater compared to sand, that they maintain enough bacteria to handle waste even if the surrounding sand is removed.

bottom sand is not contacting much wastewater anyway, live rocks contact it three dimensionally. These are the physics rules for the surface area we deal with, and distilled down to forum practice we can do anything you want to your sand without harming your reef, using new rules.

 

[brandon429.2.0]

We do the light ramping to handle burns from alk drops in the sand removed water, it wasn’t for bacterial help that’s where the masses got it wrong, so they werent able to remove sandbeds correctly. A reefer named Cook found the alk link.

Dropping light intensity is required, and a slow ramp back up. The second tenet is cloudless disassembly and reassembly, within the dirt cloud is rotting bacterial states and compounds and we must isolate it from sensitive animals.


above he did all the rules, and effected a total instant skip cycle sand bed removal.


3rd tenet:

see how deep cleaning isn’t bad here

he was moving homes...forced to act.

but what if his tank was three years running at home and had cyano sandbed and I’d recommended this exact job


I’d be flamed out the door for crazy recommends

but in the context of a forced home move, the crowd allows the move...notice how the biology remains independent to the judgement on when to apply it.

meaning we use this method to decimate dinos in some reefs, to force a win.


then we put the bed back five months later, rinsed, see how this can be applied?

Someone at thereeftank post us your tank transfer / upgrade job coming up we can pull it off easy.
Here was the reef yesterday, before the removal.

 

[brandon429.2.0]

When moving sand between tanks, always do the tap rinse portion above, don't skip it, don't use one single handful of the old sand.

4th tenet
So above

What's stopping him from pre rinsing new sand, in tap then ro for cloudless addition of course, then adding it to this clean tank above?

Nothing, nothings stopping him. You're seeing 50% of a completed sandbed swap. We're just pausing a long time and maybe permanently on the put back. You have a direct roadmap for reef aquarium sandbed swaps in these details

thank you Chris

 

[brandon429.2.0]

The reason we pre rinse all new sand here is for silt cloud rejection, we dont care about its bacteria. You want snowglobe clean sand nobody wants an extended dim cloud suspension haze, we pre rinse.


The reason we never use one handful of sand from an old tank is because rot compounds vary tank to tank, and this practice causes total fish wipeouts about 1 of 20 cases, my % summary based on running the studies.

So since that gentleman above was able to not put any sand back, us withholding handfuls to attain 100% safety rate won't seem dismissive.

If there's any post that could get Geoff out of retirement it'd be this one.

5th tenet:

All the filtration in the whole tank beyond sand is equally expendable, meaning all your bioballs can go at once as well. The concept of mass relocation and preservation in substrate removal experiments has been found incorrect. What's correct is live rock is always enough, we're not using too-few live rocks to run our fish bioload, this is how bare bottom folks get away with it.

The fact someone elected to add lots of extra surface area by sand, and by bioballs or marine pure blocks, doesn't mean it's integrally linked in the filtration chain, it's not. Surface area beyond live rock is expendable where needed to be. This is a powerful reef tank trick to know and to implement.

Leftover surface area after removal is already full of its own bac. There isn't room for new bacteria to stack on top, water shear still regulates, and even if they did stack it lowers surface area presentation vs builds it, a clogged filter is less efficient than a clean one.


More bacteria isn't what helps filtration handle loading, it's presentation to wastewater that matters. A thin veneer on live rock jutting directly in the center of flow is a sufficient biofilter. We haven't pushed him to the edge, he can still carry more fish if he wants. We are this overdone on surface area in the hobby. The new aquascaping concept called negative aquascaping makes use of this recently- discovered surface area rule (huge coral stands but low to no exposed live rock, reduced vs piled in, showcases corals)