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

[Rondelet]

I have a 120 FOWRL with aragonite sand (very coarse). I use a gravel cleaner/vacuum (basically smaller siphon hose into a much larger diameter pipe) and clean the gravel about once a month. It's not a big job and I do most areas that I can reach when I do it. The fish (mixed angels, butterfly, tang and some small guys) eat quite a bit and I don’t feed too sparingly. The cleaning seems to do the trick, as the water quality is stable, nitrates low (but not zero), and the fish happy. While I skim a lot, I think if you didn't clean the sand bed/gravel the accumulated waste would become problematic over time. Even with a bare bottom it seems to me that you have to physically remove some proteinaceous material from the system at some point.

[Flusher]

I was having a similar concern in one of my nanos. It houses a mantis shrimp, so the cleaning crew will inevitably be short-lived.

I tried something new tonight: I put a short length of PVC over the powerhead in the sump (using an elastic band as an O-ring), and filled it with a fine filter media. I then used a turkey baster to blow all the crud off the rock. With the attachment on the powerhead, the water clears up within an hour or so (as opposed to overnight without it). After three blasts over the course of the evening, the crud in the tank was very noticeably less. Tomorrow I'll take off the PVC attachment so it doesn't become a nitrate trap, then I'll just siphon out the bottom of the sump.

Too easy. I'm sure this could work on a larger tank.
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