Clean my sand bed or leave it alone?

[Steph1]

Hi Guys, I am wondering is better to clean my sand bed or not I have seen 3 options

1, clean the sandbed with syphon when I do water changes
2, Dont clean it
3,Clean it but only do a 1/4 of the area at a time
4,?
Thanks Guys

 

[laverda]

Personal choice really. I know people that want their sand to look immaculate. i prefer mine more natural like the rest of my tank.

 

[Steph1]

Thanks Laverda, I meant from a tank health/hygene perspective.

 

[laverda]

I still thing it is up to you. I have had a deal sand bed for 16 years on my previous tank an only occasionally stirred or vacuumed parts of it. I would say on average less than once a year. The animals you keep will make a difference on how you handle it. I have always had a variety of animals that buried on dug in the sand.

 

[najer]

As above, get things that work for you, add copepods and feed live phyto, dove snails are great as they are small and live in the sand, they also breed like rabbits.
Get a fish that likes to clean sand or a tiger tail cucumber.
The sand where my cave goby is perched is about seven inches tall, you might not want an engineer goby!

 

[Steph1]

Thanks for the replies and stunning photography Nager great choice of DOF!

 

[najer]

Thanks for the replies and stunning photography Nager great choice of DOF!

Thanks, I love taking pictures, this was about an hour ago.

 

[SMSREEF]

Any tank I’ve had with sand or gravel, I’ve always vacuumed it. I’m not fanatical about it. But get what I can about once a month. Even my bare bottom tanks I siphoned the bottom.

on my new cube I have a sand star and fighting conch and lots of crazy little hermit crabs. I think my sand would still look good if I didn’t vacuum it. But it’s kind of a habit at this point, if it ain’t broke...

 

[Steph1]

Thanks guys, would anyone dissuade me from giving my substrate a bit of a syphon every week with my water change?

 

[ApoIsland]

Thanks guys, would anyone dissuade me from giving my substrate a bit of a syphon every week with my water change?

Well you definitely don't need to do it as evidenced by many many nice tanks from people who will tell you they never touch their sand.

Plenty of threads out there of tank crash after disturbing sand beds.

Personally i would not touch a sand bed unless the ratio of tank water to sand being moved around is quite large. No idea what a good ratio would be but for me I would never intentially disturb even a very small portion of any sand bed in a tank less than 55g.

Of course I'm sure 99.9% of the time you would be fine as evidenced by the multitude of commenters who do clean it without issue. I just don't want to risk being that 1 in 1000 for an act that may or may not be beneficial to the health of your tank even when successfully accomplished.