I want to remove ALL my sand..
 

I have the siphon ready to go... my only real concern is the fact that I'm remocing "all" the sand, so I am figuring that I will disrupt something.. at the same time I just cleaned my entire sandbed a week or so ago, so it's pretty gunk-free.

Will it hurt anything if I remove all my sand in one shot? I just know that my SPS will look and do better without all the nutrients in my tank.

TIA. :biggrin:

How much sand? depth?

Hmm.. definitely not a DSB. I'd say no more than a 2" sandbed .. probably closer to 1 and a half or so.

How old is the sandbed and when you say you cleaned it last week, what does that include?

Sandbed is approx. a year and a half old. I cleaned the sandbed with large air tubing (siphon) .. worked incredibly well. But seeing what came out of the sand just made me want to get rid of it. Pretty nasty stuff.

IMHO I would just pull it and be done. 1-1.5 inches is not enough to act as much of a bilogical filter in any way. It is just a nutrient sink.

Keith

I don't have first hand experience with removing a sandbed from an existing tank but I would at the very least run LOTS of carbon.

Maybe someone with more hands on knowledge will chime in.

IMO if you are upgrading your tank in the near future like you keep saying, I would wait till then and do it all at once. :wink:

Thanks Keith and Ryan. I know, I know.. like 4 months of saying "gunna upgrade" ... pretty pathetic... I know! School is starting now, and I fear an upgrade is not looking so hot at the moment... we'll see how things play out.

Well if it helps make you feel any better, I bought my 280 gallon tank to "upgrade" to in February 2005, and it is still empty. To be honest, I've even toyed with the idea of selling it because I'm not really happy with the simplistic overflow design I got talked into accepting by the builder, when I should have insisted I wanted a coast to coast overflow. Now I kinda look at my corner overflow on the empty 6' tank and wonder if it's really going to make me happy. But this was the tank to end all tanks, I don't feel like hauling it up the stairs and hauling another one down. I'm thinking if it's still waterless at the 2 year mark then I might as well sell it though. We'll see what the fall brings.

As for the sand, we're talking about a 20gal, right? How much sand can there be in there, one bag's worth maybe (20-30lbs)? I'd just siphon it out if that's what you wanted. Run carbon and do a water change to be safe.