Refreshing a sand bed

[Mrcote1]

Hey everyone,
I was wondering if anyone ever tried slowly replacing their sandbed? I'd be using the same type of sand (the aragonite special grade). My sandbed is about 2 inches maybe 3 inches in some spots. The sand is a little over a year old and vacuuming it did nothing. Sand stirrers also aren't able to make it look new. It must have coraline growth on it because it has this reddish brown color that just doesnt go away, not even when mixed. So I was gonna buy a new bag and replace like 1/10 of the sandbed a week? Anyone ever do this or see any issues with this plan? I do have sps, soft coral, and lps
Thanks

 

[Elegance Coral]

I would just siphon out all the sand, maybe over a few water changes, run it BB for a little while, then replace with new clean sand.
JMHO
Peace
EC

 

[Mrcote1]

I would just siphon out all the sand, maybe over a few water changes, run it BB for a little while, then replace with new clean sand.
JMHO
Peace
EC

I have sand burrowing wrasse so bare bottom wouldn't work. I wish I could

 

[brandon429]

Take pics for us to use pls

Drain and catch your reef water in a brute, easy re use.


Complete the pre rinse of new sand, champ style. Cloudless new sand.


Swap it all

Refill. Take skip cycle pics and flush out your rocks of pent up detritus before you put them back in tank, we simply remove all detritus by combining cleaning with tank access, that’s how we run those work examples without ammonia testing. It’s skip cycle work in all cases.

Official Sand Rinse and Tank Transfer thread

If you are reading this thread to cure a tank invasion from a link I sent you, we do not need to identify your type of invasion here we do not need you to test anything at anytime regarding nitrate, phosphate etc Above all, we do not need to see a microscope slide picture of your invasion at...

www.reef2reef.com

The surface area in a sandbed is incidental, extra, beyond what’s needed. The live rocks are instantly enough to take on filtration when a bed is removed, we show. If you had bare minimalist live rock, a massive fish load, and sand maybe we’d refigure. But twenty pages, all different reefs, no losses due to known surface area biology for reef tanks. No ramp down / slow removal time is needed, the rocks do not take on extra bac for the lack of sand. The surface area on live rock doesn’t have free space to take on more bac. Factors like water shear and space competition already runs the live rock at full bac potential. The reason it takes over for sand removal is because 1/2 your current load of live rock, left after a sand removal, would still filter your ammonia. Typical live rock is that powerful of an ammonia scrub...even large chunks of boulder-like base rock still present massive surface area.

We deal in surface area excess in reefing, it’s honed in our training. All of us.
Removing surface area isn’t harmful, it’s upwelling waste in the process.


The sand was extra, not needed, incidental surface area same as if you randomly chose to hook up eight canister filters one day. That wouldn’t kill your tank although it’s redundant. You could pull the filters offline instantly and the system is ok, same rule.