Detritus/Sand Bed Cleaning in FOWLR

[cpenner]

Hello,

For those of you out there that have FOWL, how do you keep your sand bed looking clean and get rid of detritus? I currently have an empty 55 with live rock and algae and a somewhat dirty sand bed. I'm trying to avoid as much manual cleaning as possible

I'm not too sure what type of fish I want to get yet, but in the event it likes to snack on snails or other inverts, what do you guys do? Are most of the fish that do eat inverts too large for a 55 anyways and I have nothing to worry about?

Cheers!

Chad

[Ruth]

I don't currently have a FOWLR although I do think I will turn my 190 into one when I get my 300g set up.
Because these fish are usually fairly messy eater and will snack on inverts etc. I am going to go BB (or rather keep it BB) that way it is much easier to just siphon the cooters off the bottom. It all gets covered in coraline anyway and just makes maintenance way easier.

[cpenner]

Yeah, I completely agree....

My only problem is I have sand in there already. I did have a LPS tank but when I moved, I sold all my corals and am now left with sand/rocks.

[Ruth]

Siphon it out. Lots of people have done that. I would do it over about 2 or 3 water changes though and you might have to take all your live rock out at the end to get it all. Good chance to really rinse off the LR and get all the cooters out of that though.

[cpenner]

Yeah, that's not a bad idea...

Thanks for the tip!

[Skimmerking]

Yuppers Bare Bottom is the way to go I have had the pleasure of running a 170 gal tank with BB and all I can say is AWESOME. Love it you can jack the flow up and not worry about the sand going everywhere.
My clean up time was really short i would suck up around 10 gallons of water and fitler it thru a sock. Once it settled i put it back in or just did a 10 gal change on the tank.

ANd i had a Barracuda pump running with hte tank as a closed loop. Make sure you have a huge skimmer too. to collect the crap that the fish had put out.

good luck keep us posted