if I was starting any size tank be it 1 gallons or 100 gallons the caribsea live sand I use would be this clean at the start. you can pick up a handfull, drop it underwater while the tank running, and not even silty particles circulate, the sand falls down because they were pre removed
we have a long boring sand rinse thread that basically sums up to say you cant rinse bacteria off sand, so I take things a step further here and rinse the sandbed underneath an 11 yr old pico with tap water, because upon rinsing and refill, its still an active filter, because we can't rinse bacteria off sand grains that at the microscopic level look like the grand canyon of surface area
if you have too bright white lighting and the slightest amount of detritus in the bed, where it can't pass a drop test, then brown growth and various topical algae invasions are common and cyano is completely common in unrinsed beds. ***beds left untouched tend to cycle through invasions and stabilize (or not = help me constant cyano thread) and this is where the hands off crowd gets their motivation to state we're crazy for rinsing. its all a fair mode of choice they just have different pros and cons. I think outcomes range if we do hands off sandbedding, ie the Berlin system 1998 called. Im not saying they don't work long term, im saying we moved on as a hobby past that into needing to dump vodka into our tanks to handle nitrate, because live sand systems were generating not reducing it.
does that mean we don't have examples of 12 yr old DSB's that do reduce nitrates to the point the keeper has to add stump remover? sure, in limited examples. most are cyano headaches and no rinsed bed above ever misbehaves, its as impactful as not having sand at all it just takes work to rinse this clean.
when you say clean bed Picasso, can your sandbed right now pass a drop test where it wont cloud if you deeply disturb it in the tank?
