live sand question

[Myka]

Imo, all of the "live" bagged sand is a really just a successful marketing scam. You can get the same grain sizes in dry sand which is much cheaper. All sand will cloud your water for some time. "Live" sands will cloud the water for much less time than dry sands will even if you rinse both of them very well. If you use dry sand your tank may be cloudy for a week as the bacteria form a film over the sand grains and weigh them down. This happens faster with the "live" sand just because it has been wet for so much longer. As long as you have live rock, it will very quickly seed the sand and make it live (in "real" terms haha).