Trying to decide on substrate

[Patis55]

So there are so many pros and cons to each that it makes it very hard to decide.
I want a sand bed for looks with the ease of a glass bottom. Like thats gonna happen, right
So lets see if i have this correct.
Shallow sand bed you vacuum every couple weeks to clean it and stir it up.
With a DSB you pretty much leave it alone and try to cultivate a diverse fauna that makes a DSB work.
Is my thinking right or wrong?

 

[Rick.45cal]

You can actually keep shallow sand beds that you don't touch, and DSB that you manually agitate too! There's a multitude of ways to run a tank with sand.

I have a shallow bed in this tank, when I first started the tank I vacuumed it every week when I changed water. But now that my tank does automatic water changes, I occasionally will stir it up. Maybe once every couple weeks tops. I have also stirred it every day like @blusop's "white sand method". (Personally I like his method).

A lot of my sand migrates around because of the current that I have in my tank. Which actually today, I started adding some more coarse new aragonite to the areas that constantly end up bare. So we will see, it seems to have helped the great sand migration.

A sandbed can be as little or as much work as you want to make it.

 

[ndrwater]

Whatever you choose, don't do Oolite sand. Looks great till you add powerheads. Probably the biggest mistake in my tank to date was Oolite or sugar sand. As Rick mentioned above, there are bare spots in my tank that I just have to deal with..

 

[Patis55]

Whatever you choose, don't do Oolite sand. Looks great till you add powerheads. Probably the biggest mistake in my tank to date was Oolite or sugar sand. As Rick mentioned above, there are bare spots in my tank that I just have to deal with..

Yeah. I do not want that fine for sure!