Sugar Sized Sand to . . . What? Sand Storm Happening .. Need some help

[NastayNatron]

I have had my 125g sps reef set up for about 8 months now. I have two Vortech MP40s running in reef crest at 100%. At first all was fine. Until I got a Diamond Head Goby. I do love to watch the goby and he now has my once brown sand bed shiny white. I also have a leopard wrasse in my tank and love the look of sand so going bare bottom is not an option.

Has anyone ever switched there sand bed? It is a shallow sand bed about 2" deep with sugar sized Caribsea Sand. I was thinking I could suck about half of the sand bed out with a gravel syphon. Give the tank about a week or so just incase it needs to re-populate some bacteria and then go for round two and syphon out the other half. As soon as the second half is removed I would immediately add about 1/3 of the new substrate so the wrasse and goby have something to hang out in. A week later I would add another third and finally one week later, the final third.

I was thinking about putting Caribsea Seafloor Special Grade substrate in. Is anyone using this in high flow SPS tanks? It must not blow around even with the constant sifting by my goby. It also must be fine for wrasse's and also my sand sifter! Am I on the right track here? Is this the proper sand?

All in all it would be about a 4 week process which would hopefully save me from blowing sand off ALL my corals every morning. Looking forward to your opinions/experiences!

Nate

[Hiab422]

Tagging along have the same problem

[Proteus]

I have a diamond gobie who would create sand storms the same as yours. Couldn't catch fish so I changed out sand bed. I just used a hose and siphoned it out Through a colander into a Rubbermaid. Then replaced with chips all in two days.

[NastayNatron]

Titus - Did you notice any swings in any of your tank parameters when changing the whole bed that quick? How big of a tank was it? I would love to be able to just do it in a couple days if it won't affect the tank too much.

[jostafew]

Tagging along. Planning a similar process; gonna pull about half the sand bed from the accessible areas, move it to the new nano and its DSB, and replace with something coarser.

[Proteus]

I only did half the tank. Just what was exposed. The sand that was behind or under the rock I left as not to bring up sulphides. The sand that I pulled out was already agitated daily from the gobie 2 sea stars and snails. And I washed the chip before I put it in.

I never noticed anything out of the ordinary but my skimmer was off for two weeks as I was battling ich. The tank is 180 gallon and I pulled out about 6 to 8 gallons of sand

If you smell rotting eggs than this is hydrogen sulfide. It is very toxic and can kill fish in higher concentration. If it smells then that's not high enough to kill. As it you cannot smell it when the ppm rises.

You can add some hydrogen peroxide before you start process this will oxidize any h2s that is released. Probably a good idea to do water change also.

[Aquattro]

I changed out the sand in my 180, doing a third of the sand each water change (2 weeks apart) over 6 weeks. No adverse effects on the tank.

[bignose]

Was there any affects to fish like scooter dragonettes that don't eat prepared food/pellet when you changed sand?