Should i switch??
 

Ok i've been reading about the advantages of running a bare bottom tank.
So my question is,i have an established sand bed that i would like to siphon out of my reef tank and go bare bottom.
Do you guys and girls see anything bad that could result from doing this?
I'm sure i can get it out by only siphoning 5 gallons(sand and water),I do 5 gallon a week change regardless.
I do have a stocked tank,sps,lps,clams ect...
Thanks
Pat

Hope this makes sense?????

Pat with a BB tank your not dealing with dirty glass when i had my DSB the glass was dirty all the time. I was cleaning the glass every day and with a BB tank Im cleaning once a week or twice a week.. yes with a DSB you get 0 nitrates, but you have a build up of crap from the tank that you don't see. WIth my BB tank Im sucking out crapevery week depending on the flow of course.

Lots of people will jack the flow up and have the crap always suspended for the over flow to take away so the skimmer to clean. At first the tank will look unreal until the coraline will start to grow and then you will have lots of coraline. HOwever with lots of coraline comes lots of CAlcium usage. So its 2 of one and a half dozen on the other It seems that we can not ever win. There is always something that you have to tweak in the tank. I love the BB look its easier to have the rocks jacked up for lots of flow in the reef. But If you have lots of rock the bio filteration should take care of the nitrates. Well We hope it does I run a Cs 250 on my 65 with a 75 gal sump and I have mangroves and suck the crap out of my sump too monthly and run filter socks that i change all the time.

With mine tank i have a 65 gal mixed reef with semi hard flow. at first i had over 94X turnover with my tunze's in the sps tank/ But for some reason I couldn't keep certain SPs /:cry: Well most of the sps weere RTNing from the bottom for some reason. My levels were all good but something was wrong. SO I switched to LPS and softies, leathers. and a few hardy SPs that I know I could keep.

But at the end of the day Its all up to the person running the tank....

HTH.

mike

Thanks Mike
So now what i need to know is,is this gonna cause havic on my existing water quality?Cause i'm planning on doing this with an established tank and do not wanna kill anything ,not even an amphipode LOL,you know what i mean right.
This tank is slowly being converted to a SPS tank,acropora,montipora few clams and even fewer fish.

Here is a brief discription of what i have going:27g tank,20g sump,needle wheel skimmer rated at450gph,30lbs live rock,30lbs live sand(not for long).
LIVESTOCK
maxima clam,crocea clam,blasstomusa merili,bluetip staghorn,orange montipora,green montipora,montipora confusa,green turbinaria,acropora loripe,bubblegum chalice,bubble coral,hammer head coral,alveopora,purple frily gorgonia,yellow gorgonia,blueberry gorgonia,zoo's,mushrooms,crabs,snails,2 firefish,2 percula clowns,1 cleaner shrimp and peperminth shrimp.

It will cause an immediate effect on your water quality, you might be stirring up lots of "crud" in the sand that may or may not cause problems. But that can be cleared up with filter floss and carbon. However, long term I think you'll be happy if you can imagine not having that "white sand" look (I know I miss my sand, but I can't seem to run a tank with sand).

I would go ahead and remove the sand bit by bit, siphoning out some during each water change. I think I would do about half of the 5 gallons with sand and the other half just water. It depends on how much stuff you stir up. I ended up removing the sand in my tank in one go, with a tank teardown and restart, but I had major dinoflagellate issues so the restart was more to "shock" the system than anything else.

Thank you thats what i was looking for,I will be keeping the sand in my sump/refiugium,thats where i keep my red kelp,red mangroves ect.

great insightful response! seems like i've read alot of pros vs cons on the issue but this is new info to me...well done!

I use to run a sand bed in my sump...but because it wasn't moved around, and I run Kalk into the sump...it eventually solidified.

I decided to remove it and did so by siphoning out the sand as much as possible every time I removed water for water changes. All the released crud is siphoned away as you go. There was never any impact on the tank at all.

Unless you prefer the BB look, I would try just removing about half the sand so it's not a DSB but just ornamental and get a few watchman gobies or something to keep it turned. That way you can have a the natural look of the sand and keep the nitrates down. Some may disagree but this works quite well for me in my tank and I have a crowded sps dominated mixed reef with lots of fish.

I probably would have gone bare bottom but I drew out some plans for my canopy on the top of the stand and forgot to repaint over it so if I went bb you'd see all my doodling, drawing, math mistakes etc...

Doug

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