Advice on Nitrate/Phosphate problems

[medican]

Originally Posted by albert_dao

I don't just whip random sh1t out of my a$$ and try to pass it off as fact.

Wrong

Well thats good to hear Albert......

I'm with you Andy.....

It's not the sandbed I think it's the learning curve once you get into this hobby. You drop a ton of $$ at a store where you hope there info is correct, and acording to them it is. You get home and set up.....now its time for the 17 trips back for odds and ends you forgot or dident know you needed(cant find it all). Then you relize what you have spent and if you have a wife YOUR DEAD...

Then you change and upgrade to beat the band.... my first tank twice over....

Then, all the leasons you learn the hard way witch cost you $$$$

Then the wife thing again......

If you are ever happy with your tank it just means that your planning to buy something BIGGER and BETTER....

If you get through all of that .......

And your still married..... and still have a tank

You get to be one of us that have more than just a screw loose and love this hobby.........

6/10 will quite because they truly don't love the hobby....


P.S

I don't just whip random sh1t out of my a$$ and try to pass it off as fact.


LMAO

[albert_dao]

Here's the causation behind my statement:

- Sand bed tanks take two to ten times longer than BB tanks to clean.

- People are not able to keep up with three to five hour a week cleaning routines.

- The tank quality begins to decline and people lose further motivation to work on their tank due to lack of results when they do.

- Cichlids can be pretty damn colorful.

- Wife factor kicks in = quit.

This completely skips the whole nutrient arguement. There's a whole host of reasons for running BB there, but that's a matter of personal aesthetics when you really boil it down.

I suppose the last thing I'll add to this facet of the argument is: How many customers does everyone here have to base their claims on? I have most of Calgary's hobby base.

[Reefer Rob]

Sand beds need to be cleaned?? The #1 rule of sand beds is... leave them alone. Let the critters do the work of stiring and cleaning. With enough current nothing will settle on them. Albert, I've read a lot of your posts, and I respect your opinions, but you need do need to chill a bit.

[albert_dao]

Hmmm? My apologies, I'm not trying to be confrontational, but I also dislike being taken for an idiot.

Anyway, you are 100% correct, but the context is wrong. DSB's should not be disturbed and that assumes that the user has access to real live sand with real sand dwelling organisms:

- Worms from your live rock are not good enough. They are not true sand dwelling organisms and will not overturn the top layers of your sand. That's why the tracks you see in your sand now are the same tracks you're going to see three days, four weeks, six months from now. At this rate, the removal of detritus is a losing battle and the sand WILL reach critical mass and crash your system. I don't know about the rest of Canada, but no one here brings in live sand. It's not profitable and hard to maintain properly in a retail environment without dedicated holding tanks.

- Non-DSB sandbeds do not develope the type of positive anaerobic activity that people are aiming for. They just collect detritus. Again, the above point applies.

- The only form in which I could possibly justify sand is if a person absolutely cannot stand the look of bare bottom. In that case, a thin layer of sand (less than 0.5") is acceptable as long as it's vacuumed regularily (at least once a week) and replaced every six months.

I have a lot of strong opinions, not because I'm belligerant, but because I have accumulated experience and it does me well to pass on that knowledge.

[medican]

Thanks for clearing that up........

[albert_dao]

1. when you clean your sand bed you release a bunch of the stuff we try to get rid of in our tanks. The sand bed has its purpose and one of those is to filter that stuff. we keep the small critters there to clean the sand bed to keep it in check. When you change from a sand bed to a BB the release of nitrates is huge. No O2=denitrifying bacteria....but I'm sure you know that.

That's the thing, you DON'T GET THESE CRITTERS! Access to animals like burrowing crustaceans and worms is rather... nonexistant in Alberta, probably all of Canada. Hell, I've never seen them for sale in the states, only bristleworm packages. Again, unless you have access to proper live sand to top off a DSB, you're pretty much setting up a time bomb.

2. If your telling your customers to clean there sand bed, no wonder there tanks don’t thrive. So if you leave it alone like your supposed to, cleaning takes less time unless you like to look at all the crap on the bottom(until it grows over)

1. I don't start my customers with sand. I haven't in almost two years now. If they have sand, it's either because they started under someone else's guidance or they couldn't stand the look of BB. In the latter case, I recommend a super thin sandbed.

2. Anyone who has approached me with problems generally DID NOT touch their sand bed. In those instances, removal of the sandbed WAS the solution. I can't even count the number of times I've heard someone say to me "I'm never going back to sand".

3. As I've insinuated in my other comments, leaving your sandbed alone is NOT a viable option for long term survival of a reef tank. What if you need to move your rock to catch a fish or pick up a piece of coral that's fallen behind your tank? Do you risk crashing your tank each time that happens? I don't think most of us get into this hobby because we need to add another aspect to our gambling addictions.

Did you just claim to have the largest salt water customer base??????
Now you run a good shop but I think you’re a little full of yourself

I knew I was going to get grilled for that one, but what's done is done. I apologize for the remark. But like I've said before, it's in my best interest to keep people in the hobby. I'm not spewing misinformation, nor am I being unreasonable. My explanations were objective and I did provide a counterpoint (thin sandbed).

And yes, I do have the largest SW customer base in Calgary. I don't think anyone is going to deny that.

[Moogled]

I'm going to chime in here and shed some light on this situation.

There is definitely an objective reason why people decide to go barebottom. It's probably a moot point to restate all the points that Albert made, but I'll do it anyway for the people that are slow to catch on:

1. This is the most common complaint I hear BEFORE people go BB. "The sandbed is a bitch to clean because of the detritus."
The reason this is first and foremost the single most important key point as to why people remove sandbeds.The accumulation of detritus is extremely high for whatever reason; fish waste, rock detritus. A barebottom 33g tank can have its waste siphoned in roughly a minute. The lack of sandbed allows all waste to gather into dead spots which make it relatively easy to remove.

2. You cannot easily remove as much detritus from a sandbed, unless you spend extreme amounts of time making sure the substrate is clean.

3. Since there are no small critters in your sand to do what you THINK they should be doing, the sandbed essentially becomes a nutrient sink.

4. In juxtaposition to #3, detritus can accumulate much more easily and crash a tank.

Names don't matter that much. So what if I rattle a list of 10 or 20 people that will never go back to using a sandbed?

By the way medican, the learning curve is correlated with the decisions you make within the hobby. It's a question of practicality v.s aesthetics. Since there are is no real live sand with real sand dwelling organisms, the question of beneficial nutrients is irrelevant. Sand just provides another form of denitrification, of which there already is enough in the LR.

Originally Posted by medican

6/10 will quite because they truly don't love the hobby....

Yeah, because people that don't enjoy chores hate their homes.

[medican]

Well chime you did.....
Since you might as well of cut and paste Albert, thanks for your thought.

Going on and on.......

well maybe but if you had read the posts before it was stated that the sand bed and the hassle they cause is one of the reasons people get out of the hobby. I would say that’s not true and stated why I thought people left the hobby. It's just my opinion, but once again thanks for your thought.

Your right, if your not going to use a sand bed for what its ment for then BB is the way to go. I would say .5 to 1in is a waist of time and I wouldn’t have the time to clean it either.

In your post 1 is stating the same as 2,4 we can put in there too.

LMAO.....#3 I think the only SLOW one out there is YOU.........the rest of the people on here I don’t think would take kindly to being called that.

Sand beds when used properly(not cleaned) once they have matured(I ment the sand bed), play an essential roll in the cycle of a reef tank.
IMO a true reef tank should be able to take care of its own waist products with little or no help from us.

By the way a learning curve is about learning NOT decisions.

Nobody said anything about beneficial nutrients in a sand bed.

What do you think creates a denitrification prosess in the sand bed.

Even Albert has stated there is not enough in live rock...+....its not the same thing. One works on high O2 the other on Low O2.

I'll see your 10 or 20 names and raise you a PH D in micro biology

you might think he goes on and on but in the end you will see pictures of what’s in your sand bed. (If anything you will like the pictures)
http://reefkeeping.com/issues/2003-0...ture/index.php


I think the light you shed is a little dim

Take Care

[Moogled]

1- how many people are actually willing to contribute 6+ inches of depth to a sand bed?

2 - Proper sediment size is tricky, again, a direct result of availability of real live sand in Canada.

3 - As Albert stated, what happens when you move rocks around? What about rocks that you have to root deeper within the sandbed for stability?

4 - Ron's article puts a huge amount of emphasis on the non-bacterial organisms in the sand. Organisms that, guess what, I've never seen anywhere in Canada. In fact, the entire second half of the article is devoted to the larger organisms within the sand.

The key to the success of such a sand bed community is water movement between the sediment grains. I mentioned above that it is essentially impossible for waves or water currents to move water in sediments. However, there is an exceptionally useful method of generating slow and even water movement through sediments. This water movement is caused by the motion of the animals in the upper inch or so of sand, particularly in those vertically-oriented tube worms such as Phyllochaetopterus, but also by all other animals moving in the upper sediment layers. The amount of water moved by one worm is quite small, on the order of a few fractions of a milliliter per day to a couple of milliliters per hour, but the cumulative total of all the water moved by all the animals in the sand bed is quite considerable. It is enough to push water into and through the sediments.

As live rock is concerned, there is a enough anaerobic activity within a tank taht has an average ratio of live rock enough to keep the nitrates within my tank at <1ppm (Salifert).

"By simply setting up a deep sand bed, and then maintaining that bed with the proper diversity and mix of animals, reef aquarists can facilitate the utilization of the necessary excess nutrient resulting from normal feeding."

You should take things into context before hopping onto an argument where some things don't even apply.

[Chin_Lee]

Isn't this is kinda a silly debate?
From one perspective, Albert (in his experience as a retailer) believes he has formed a correlation between the people who quit the hobby after they started an aquarium with a sandbed and the people who remain in the hobby after they started an aquarium with barebottom.
From another perspective, Richard (medican) doesn't believe Albert.

So......... point taken.

a learning curve is about learning NOT decisions.

there is a definite correlation between a learning curve and decisions you do make because if it didn't, then you didn't learn anything.