Bare Bottom or Deep Sand Bed for Reef Tank
- Thread starter dickenscd
- Start date
I have decided to go for 6" DSB, what do you mean?
I vote yes !
- Location
- north jersey
+1
my fuge has 6" dsb with chaeto and seagrass
- Location
- BROOKLYN/PARK SLOPE
if you going to use macro algae, why put a dsb? the macro will take care of nitrates.
if you want a dsb for nitrate removal, without macro, then i recommend you dont use a light, if its a seperate from dt.
if you want a dsb for nitrate removal, without macro, then i recommend you dont use a light, if its a seperate from dt.
dickenscd said:
I personally think it is. Both DSB & a macroalgae fuge support a great deal of microfauna, each supporting different types best. If the sand bed does crash, it's not a huge deal, in most cases, to dump and start over.
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- Location
- north jersey
mine started out as a refugium with dsb and chaeto....now it turned into a chaeto/seagrass/refugium/frags/coral "recovery room"/seahorse/mandarin/dendros/sun polyps tank.
since i've been feeding the seahorse/dendros/sun polyps and keeping the t5's on a little longer for the frags, i've been getting some hair algae, cyano, and diatoms on the sand. not too bad and not in the dt just in the fuge.
not sure if it was a good idea to put all that stuff in there but that's what happened.
Started with 6" DSB, but now some areas are 4" and some are 8"+ due to wrasses and 2 11in engineer gobys who move the sand like they are on a mission all day long!...I think one of my biggest issues is the light from sump grows algae through the glass on the very bottom of sand bed, so when lights out and that dies I sometimes have spikes in numbers. I have been thinking about painting it black or vinyl or something.
As shown on the following picture, I am using 180G (6' x 2' x 2') AGA tank for my sump to support over 500 gallon reef tanks.
I have been using H&S A300 skimmer, carbon, phosphate remover, and 100mg ozone. Half the space (3' x 2') had live rock and chaeto with reverse light for 14 hours a day, and the nitrate had been less than 1ppm for more than 2 years.
In Sept. this year, I added 6" Caribsea sand into the space where I had live rock and chaeto,and I found nitrate surged from 1ppm to 50 ppm this week.
What can be the problem?
Is there any side effect to have light and chaeto in a remote DSB?
James
I have been using H&S A300 skimmer, carbon, phosphate remover, and 100mg ozone. Half the space (3' x 2') had live rock and chaeto with reverse light for 14 hours a day, and the nitrate had been less than 1ppm for more than 2 years.
In Sept. this year, I added 6" Caribsea sand into the space where I had live rock and chaeto,and I found nitrate surged from 1ppm to 50 ppm this week.
What can be the problem?
Is there any side effect to have light and chaeto in a remote DSB?
James
- Location
- Jefferson City, MO
I would keep the live rock that you have and add a RDSB to it. This can be as simple as a 5 gallon bucket with sand 3/4 or so full. You prob. have some empty salt buckets around. Use one of those, drill two holes about an inch from the top. One hole put a bulkhead or secure however you want and thats your inline, connected to power heard. The other hole is your outflow. The total flow should be just fast enough to not disturb the sand. Borman wrote an article about this. In response to some who thought that the water would never reach the bottom of the bucket and have not effect to it, he suggested that they pour a cup of gasoline in the bottom of the bucket, then fill it with sand, then connect it to their system. If they were correct then the gasoline should not have any effect on their system. I don't think that any of them took him up on it. He uses RDSB on his tanks and has tested the sand at the bottom of the buckets and found lots of bacteria, etc. If you have a large system, you could even use a 55 gallon barrel with sand in it. I am in process of taking the DSB out of my display, going with 1" and doing the RDSB and I have couple of frag tanks that have 4" or so of sand in them, as well as stock tank with couple hundred pounds of LR. Like was said earlier, there are lots of ways of doing it, just pick what works for you and go for it . . . kinda like sex.
If either macro algae or DSB can take care of nitrates, why don't we have both in one place and accelerate the nitrate removal?
James
- Location
- Southampton UK
Hi James.
Sorry i missed your pM so heres my experiences.
Quite a few years back I ran one of my DSB's with caulerpa (lit 24/7) for approximately 4-5 years. My current DSB has been running in the dark for the last 3-4 years with Chaeto in a seperate area thats reverse lit 12hrs.
The downsides to running algae in a DSB are two fold ime over the long term.
1. Any rooting algaes gradually clog the substrate up over time, binding it together reducing diffusion, and limiting the burrowing capacity of any fauna present. After 4 years, i found my entire DSB top layer was basically a solid mass of sand and roots with plenty of surface life, but not alot of burrowing going on...The algae was doing great, but the sand bed was gradually suffocating once you got beyond the 2" boundry layer. so on that basis id say, that if you want to combine sand with algae such as Caulerpa (im not including seagrasses here) then id say, stick to 2"...any deeper and its a waste of time ime.
2. Algae placed above the substrate can act like a filter, trapping waste over time to the degree that a good proportion of your critter population moves up out of the sand into the algae to get at the food source. Ive seen a few cases where its been such an extensive migration, that the sand bed becomes basically barren. Obviously here, there are changes you can make, ie only allowing algae to cover half of the substrate at any one time, whilst leaving the other half exposed to let incoming waste settle out somewhat, to provide a local food source thats easily accessible at sand level.
Light V Dark.
I'll deffinately confrm from my observations that dark beds do better than lit ones as far as critter action goes and overal bed health. imo this is due to the fact that the critters (especially larger ones such as bristle worms etc) are far happyer coming out under the cover of darkness than they are in lit conditions, so a dark bed generally gets a more consistant level of disturbance and scavenging than one thats lit either part or all of the time.
If you have the facility /space to seperate out the two areas, then id say it can offer better results.
If not, then dont panic. as long as you understand the pros and cons then you can allways make adjustments later on to keep things on track (stripping out 50% of the sand bed and algae encroachment every two years and replacing it with new that will seed from the remainder), or keeping the sand bed to 2" and settling more for a shallow sand bed/algae type refugium, rather than a true DSB / algae combo.
I dont think iether method is wrong. Both have and do work very well.
regards
Sorry i missed your pM so heres my experiences.
Quite a few years back I ran one of my DSB's with caulerpa (lit 24/7) for approximately 4-5 years. My current DSB has been running in the dark for the last 3-4 years with Chaeto in a seperate area thats reverse lit 12hrs.
The downsides to running algae in a DSB are two fold ime over the long term.
1. Any rooting algaes gradually clog the substrate up over time, binding it together reducing diffusion, and limiting the burrowing capacity of any fauna present. After 4 years, i found my entire DSB top layer was basically a solid mass of sand and roots with plenty of surface life, but not alot of burrowing going on...The algae was doing great, but the sand bed was gradually suffocating once you got beyond the 2" boundry layer. so on that basis id say, that if you want to combine sand with algae such as Caulerpa (im not including seagrasses here) then id say, stick to 2"...any deeper and its a waste of time ime.
2. Algae placed above the substrate can act like a filter, trapping waste over time to the degree that a good proportion of your critter population moves up out of the sand into the algae to get at the food source. Ive seen a few cases where its been such an extensive migration, that the sand bed becomes basically barren. Obviously here, there are changes you can make, ie only allowing algae to cover half of the substrate at any one time, whilst leaving the other half exposed to let incoming waste settle out somewhat, to provide a local food source thats easily accessible at sand level.
Light V Dark.
I'll deffinately confrm from my observations that dark beds do better than lit ones as far as critter action goes and overal bed health. imo this is due to the fact that the critters (especially larger ones such as bristle worms etc) are far happyer coming out under the cover of darkness than they are in lit conditions, so a dark bed generally gets a more consistant level of disturbance and scavenging than one thats lit either part or all of the time.
If you have the facility /space to seperate out the two areas, then id say it can offer better results.
If not, then dont panic. as long as you understand the pros and cons then you can allways make adjustments later on to keep things on track (stripping out 50% of the sand bed and algae encroachment every two years and replacing it with new that will seed from the remainder), or keeping the sand bed to 2" and settling more for a shallow sand bed/algae type refugium, rather than a true DSB / algae combo.
I dont think iether method is wrong. Both have and do work very well.
regards
Last edited:
Simon,
Thank you very much, I changed the refugium into sand bed only at my home tanks couple weeks ago, but some side effects happened.
I am not good in writing, and will talk to you more when we share the room next time.
James
Thank you very much, I changed the refugium into sand bed only at my home tanks couple weeks ago, but some side effects happened.
I am not good in writing, and will talk to you more when we share the room next time.
James
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