Just wanted to share my experience in this space as I just spent the better part of yesterday doing just this...Rinsing my sand bed.
A little background...Upgraded my tank from a 60G to 92G (100G in total water with sump) about two months ago. I moved all live rock, coral and fish, but went with all new sand (40lbs of Tropic Eden Reef Flakes - Live) and all new water. I never had ammonia problems or what I would call a tank cycle. Being in the hobby for just about 1.5 years I called the tank upgrade a huge success! One thing I did not do was rinse my sand prior to putting it in the new tank. My uneducated thought process was that the "live" piece would help with the move and prevent a tank cycle.
For a few weeks, the new tank and sand bed were doing great. I attributed the clean sand bed to a few things - high flow from two MP40's, better water chemistry, and all the great things I read about Tropic Eden. I have always been a sand stirrer as I love a clean sand bed and will syphon the sand not every water change but maybe every other. After a few weeks with the new tank, I started to get a light diatom bloom. I knew this was a potential in the coming so didn't put much thought in it....that is until they just kept coming and coming. They were growing everywhere!!
I thought I'd just syphon them out my next water change but knew I had a couple days before I was planning on doing a water change so I got in the tank with my turkey baster and went to work blowing the sand bed hoping to stir it up some and let the sump/filters do their job. In about 30 seconds, my tank looked like the first day I assembled the tank and dumped the sand in and much like the post above -
https://www.reef2reef.com/threads/sandbed-stirred-up.544852/ . Here I was with a fairly decent amount of fish, light number of corals, and a wife staring at me like I had just killed the entire tank. Fortunately for me and the tank, after about an hour and changing out filter floss in the sump a few time, it mostly cleared up but now my rock and fish had this dust like and stringy material all over them
A few days go by and I'm on water change day so get out the syphon and go to work. Cloudy, murky water, just like I saw a couple days prior filling up my brute trash can. All I could think of while syphoning was...How am I going to get through the entire tank with only 15G of prepared water? That obviously wasn't going to happen so I finished as much as I could do and then set out on a mission to figure something out which brought me to this thread.
Because of a whole lot of factors, I didn't break down the entire tank but what I was able to do, I'd still call a sucess.
At a high level, I used a syphon to syphon as much sand as I could out of the tank. I would say I was able to remove somewhere between 80-90% of 40lbs. Live rock, corals, fish, etc all remained in DT untouched. From there, I took the sand in my brute trash can outside and with a hose and my hand stirred the sand until the water was clear. I could not believe the amount of stuff I was able to get out and wish I took pictures of the water prior to dumping it. The cloudiness, stringy white stuff, and of course diatoms was just amazing..especially after just two months!
After a thorough rinse and sand drained, I took the sand back in and filled the same can with RO water. I stirred the sand in effort to "dechlorinate" as best I could and then started adding sand back to the tank.
When I was putting the sand back in the tank, at first I was careful as I was still nervous of creating a cloudy mess but then realized there was nothing. Sand would quietly and gently fall in place with no mess. When I realized this, I just started taking large scoops of sand and just dropping it in the tank. Zero cloud, zero mess, it just fell in place as one would hope. My wife and I watched in disbelief and amazement as we were both so used to nothing but a cloud of mess occurring!
Overall, the process took me a few hours. I think if I had water pre-mixed and ready ahead of time (I did have to make a run to the LFS for RODI so had to take a break for about 1-2hrs), I could've done it in half the time. I'm honestly thinking of making it a yearly ritual and would guess with the right prep, I could do the entire tank in couple hours.
I know I'm still new to all this and not even a day post-rinse, but the tank hasn't looked this good since the day I moved stuff over. Yesterday before cleaning up and while smoothing out the sand, I was pretty deliberate in really moving the sand and again, no mess or cloud so my hope is when I get in there with my turkey baster the same will hold true.
Thanks for all that posted their success in this thread. I will say, I was super nervous about going through the process but reading about everyones process and success, it really wasn't all that bad and the benefit will surely be realized once complete!
