Crushed Coral

[speedymichael]

If I wanted to trade my crushed coral in for sand is it possible without crashing the whole tank. Can I take some CC out and combine it with sand?

 

[Jobiwan]

I do it in sections over a period of time, about 1/4 every 2 or 3 weeks, for example in a 4 foot long tank change out the left 1 foot, then the next 1 foot and so on, gives the new stuff a chance to get seeded with critters & bacteria and doesn't subject your tank to a sudden radical change....

 

[returnofsid]

It's possible to change percentages of it at a time, however, don't try layering it. The fine sand will just sink beneath the CC soon. Depending on how much live rock you have, it's possible to do it all at once. If you have enough live rock and a balanced bio-load, the live rock is doing most of the filtration anyway.

 

[Krish]

Also, depending on how long the tank has been setup and what stage in the cycling process you are in, will determine how you can go about it. As for combining the 2, like Sid mentioned, the fine sand will eventually just fall through to the bottom so personally I'd go with "either or" with the finer sand being my choice over the crushed corals because of the potential problems associated with crushed corals ..

 

[Jobiwan]

Leave a little crushed coral in one area if you are interested in burrow constructing critters and are gonna have the appropriate depth, i.e. Jawfish, prawn gobies, pistol shrimp, etc....

 

[fly guy]

IMO trading the crushed coral out for sand is a GREAT idea and you should.

However, just get it done. It wont be a radical change and is much safer than repeatedly disturbing a nasty bed of crushed coral with livestock in the tank.

Get yourself some tubs and remove the livestock first, then the rock, and just get rid of it in one clean sweep. You can safely salvage all of the water up until the point that you disturb the substrate to any degree. If this is going to take you more than a couple of hours before you start putting stuff back in you will want a small powerhead with a venturi hook up and maybe a heater in the tubs to keep the water circulated and aerated.

You will of course need enough new ASW made up to compensate for what you end up tossing. Use a 2" or bigger piece of pvc to pour then new sand in to reduce the sandstorm some, but just be prepared for couldy water for a few days. Running a filter sock in your sump can help speed this up, but it will be cloudy no matter how you slice it and thats ok

Dont waste your money on live sand. Just use new dry sand, it will become live soon enough on its own and by using new sand you KNOW you will be starting with a clean slate and will not have any cycle to speak of to worry about

 

[burning2nd]

i had some CC in my sump.. that i put sand sand over.....

Turned out it made a Inpressive sand bed...
the larger stuff on bottem and the finner stuff on top

 

[bbehring]

If you change it all out at once, you might experience another cycle (although probably small if you have a good percentage of live rock, say 1.5 to 2 lbs/gal.). Lot of factors to consider as krish75 and fly_guy mentioned. When you do replace, I used a 2" piece of PVC with a small funnel cut/taped to the top end. This allowed the sand to be slowly dumped into the funnel and flow down through the PVC tube to the bottom and minimize the snow storm. Might work to vacume out a 1/4 at a time as jobiwon indicated and replace via the sand tube (with live sand) to minimize creating a cycle?

 

[speedymichael]

thanks for everyones help