How do you clean your sand?

LiquidSpace · Jan 30, 2022

Hey guys, I’m having a hard time figuring out how to clean the gunk off the sand without sucking ALL the sand out. I can’t get just poop and gunk to be suspended, the way people talk about it it sounds like that’s the goal. As someone who has been in this hobby for a long time this is actually a pretty embarrassing question.

I have successfully cleaned freshwater sand and that was easy (big ol’ goldfish poop!) but never bothered with my marine aquariums until this nano tank. Is there a special way to do it? A special syphon you all use?

Is the goal to stir the sand up and get the gunk suspended in the water?

PokeFish · Jan 30, 2022

what kind of gunk? algae or biological waste/material

LiquidSpace · Jan 30, 2022

PokeFish said:
what kind of gunk? algae or biological waste/material

Biological

BroccoliFarmer · Jan 30, 2022

You clean it the same way you do Fresh. Plunge your syphon vaccum into the sand and pull up the guck. Put your vaccum at an angle so the sand falls / slides back down

PokeFish · Jan 30, 2022

personally i believe in not vacuuming sandbed. but I can see why some people like that white sandbed. i just like to look at all the cool things in there lol. i do have a conch however and a few nassarius snails

BroccoliFarmer · Jan 30, 2022

PokeFish said:
personally i believe in not vacuuming sandbed. but I can see why some people like that white sandbed. i just like to look at all the cool things in there lol. i do have a conch however and a few nassarius snails

I would love to do that but the amount of detritus build up is rough. Plenty of nassarius snails put still pull a bunch of nasties out when I vaccum. Thought about sand sifting star but I hear they are too good and starve in weeks

frizzayyyyreef · Jan 30, 2022

Never touch my sandbed my clean up crew does a pretty good job

PeterEde · Jan 30, 2022

My Sleeper goby keeps my sand turned over daily.
I am now removing 1/2 my sand to the sump due to the goby turning the aquascape into a snow globe. Unlike smaller gobys that dig burrows the sleeper undermines all my rock work and has caves

LiquidSpace · Jan 30, 2022

BroccoliFarmer said:
You clean it the same way you do Fresh. Plunge your syphon vaccum into the sand and pull up the guck. Put your vaccum at an angle so the sand falls / slides back down

Perfect! Like I said, pretty embarrassing question to ask. I think the main difference here for is I had big goldfish and could see the poop, now I’ve got a couple tiny clowns.

BroccoliFarmer · Jan 30, 2022

SpoiledCorndog said:
Perfect! Like I said, pretty embarrassing question to ask. I think the main difference here for is I had big goldfish and could see the poop, now I’ve got a couple tiny clowns.

You will get what looks like a dirty sandstorm coming up..just like the dirty black storm from freshwater gravel. That is when you know you got the good stuff.

OutColdCRNA · Jan 30, 2022

Turkey Baster works great to blow down into the sand and suspend a lot of the gunk into the water column for the filters to catch.

shakacuz · Jan 30, 2022

i have a fighting conch, tiger/strawberry conch, and 2 XL tongan nassarius snails that do a decent job at cleaning my sand bed. have a good handful of cerith a as well. haven’t cleaned my sand bed since i started my tank

cmoore806 · Feb 1, 2022

Do you have a small enough gravel vac to get to the nano tank sand you describe? I use the python brand they make many sizes. Even if you have very fine sand you can fold the hose to stop the siphon while the sand falls back down. The general rule is if you have a sand bed then clean it. There’s a lot of phosphate and nitrate in that waste and that will be fueling algae if it hasn’t already in your tank

EricR · Feb 1, 2022

I use Python syphon also (just the manual one) and vacuum roughly half of my sand bed every water change (every 2 weeks) -- let the sand suck up but not all the way,,, kink the hose to stop flow and let sand fall back down,,, unkink hose to suck up the cloudiness and gunk still suspended within the tube. (Python has different width/length tubes depending on tank size).

I have 1 conch and 2 nassarius snails and they stir up spots on their own but I still feel it's better to vacuum/syphon. (I used to never do it and my sand is definitely cleaner now).

mmadderom · Feb 22, 2022

BroccoliFarmer said:
I would love to do that but the amount of detritus build up is rough. Plenty of nassarius snails put still pull a bunch of nasties out when I vaccum. Thought about sand sifting star but I hear they are too good and starve in weeks

You heard wrong. I have a 2” sand bed with 2 sand sifting stars in a 180g. They are good but def not “too good”. Definitely haven’t “starved”. In well over a year. No detritus issues in a Looong time, tho.