I was forced to remove the sand bed from my sump because I over-kalked and it had solidified! (nothing in the sump to turn over the sand..)
Anyway, I simply vaccuumed the sand out using a rubber hose....(and lifted the solid lumps out by hand!) While you suck out sand, you'll also suck out a lot of nasty stuff. IMO, there is no way that you could return that vaccuumed water to the system.
Just do a little bit at a time. In my case, I would remove 2 gallons of sand/water, then replace with 2 gallons of fresh SW. I did that once per week and it took about 6-8 weeks to remove all the sand.
As usual, the #1 rule is not to do anything too fast!
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