Should i switch??

[fishface]

Originally Posted by asmodeus

Pat with a BB tank your not dealing with dirty glass when i had my DSB the glass was dirty all the time. I was cleaning the glass every day and with a BB tank Im cleaning once a week or twice a week.. yes with a DSB you get 0 nitrates, but you have a build up of crap from the tank that you don't see. WIth my BB tank Im sucking out crapevery week depending on the flow of course.

Lots of people will jack the flow up and have the crap always suspended for the over flow to take away so the skimmer to clean. At first the tank will look unreal until the coraline will start to grow and then you will have lots of coraline. HOwever with lots of coraline comes lots of CAlcium usage. So its 2 of one and a half dozen on the other It seems that we can not ever win. There is always something that you have to tweak in the tank. I love the BB look its easier to have the rocks jacked up for lots of flow in the reef. But If you have lots of rock the bio filteration should take care of the nitrates. Well We hope it does I run a Cs 250 on my 65 with a 75 gal sump and I have mangroves and suck the crap out of my sump too monthly and run filter socks that i change all the time.

With mine tank i have a 65 gal mixed reef with semi hard flow. at first i had over 94X turnover with my tunze's in the sps tank/ But for some reason I couldn't keep certain SPs / Well most of the sps weere RTNing from the bottom for some reason. My levels were all good but something was wrong. SO I switched to LPS and softies, leathers. and a few hardy SPs that I know I could keep.

But at the end of the day Its all up to the person running the tank....

HTH.

mike

great insightful response! seems like i've read alot of pros vs cons on the issue but this is new info to me...well done!

[untamed]

I use to run a sand bed in my sump...but because it wasn't moved around, and I run Kalk into the sump...it eventually solidified.

I decided to remove it and did so by siphoning out the sand as much as possible every time I removed water for water changes. All the released crud is siphoned away as you go. There was never any impact on the tank at all.

[Snappy]

Unless you prefer the BB look, I would try just removing about half the sand so it's not a DSB but just ornamental and get a few watchman gobies or something to keep it turned. That way you can have a the natural look of the sand and keep the nitrates down. Some may disagree but this works quite well for me in my tank and I have a crowded sps dominated mixed reef with lots of fish.

[BCOrchidGuy]

I probably would have gone bare bottom but I drew out some plans for my canopy on the top of the stand and forgot to repaint over it so if I went bb you'd see all my doodling, drawing, math mistakes etc...

Doug

[Skimmerking]

Originally Posted by BCOrchidGuy

I probably would have gone bare bottom but I drew out some plans for my canopy on the top of the stand and forgot to repaint over it so if I went bb you'd see all my doodling, drawing, math mistakes etc...

Doug

[ClubReef]

I have a shallow sand bed with approx 1" of sand and my reef tank is doing ok. I think you can keep a good reef with sand. I would take out sand in increments and see if your overall environment improves. Sucking out all the sand seems like an extreme measure to me and may cause more harm if you do it too quickly.

[kwirky]

I siphoned mine out with each water change. I have less microfauna without the sandbed though. I had buttloads of little critters before I removed it, and now I don't notice any. There's a little in the sump, but not much.

The BB is much easier to maintain though, and I was also having the clumped sand syndrome, since my opened top won't keep any gobies in.