Thinking about removing all of my sand. Thoughts? Opinions?

[capt_alaver]

Tank has been established for about two years now. Inhabitants include fire shrimp, randall's goby, two hermit crabs, emerald crab and turbo snail. There are seven corals, all of which are doing pretty well.

So getting geared up to remove the rocks, animals, suck all the sand out with a shop vac and go bare bottom. I'm doing this for two reasons.

First and foremost, my building is going to be tented for termites and I need to temporarily move the tank somewhere else. It will be FAR easier and cleaner to do this without a dirty old sandbed sloshing around, releasing God knows what into the water column.

Second reason is I'm hoping to solve (or at least improve) a long standing problem where my phosphate and nitrate levels do not budge from 0.00ppm. Absolutely nothing I've done over the past couple of years has been able to change that. I stopped doing water changes, I fed ridiculous amounts of food daily, I started dosing NO3/PO4 only to watch it bottom out again and again. I even introduced a fish, against my better judgement. Nothing helped. Corals are looking great as I mentioned, but their growth rate is abysmal and I can't blame them.

Has anyone removed an established sandbed before? What were your experiences?

 

[Reefer Matt]

I removed all the sand from my 5 year old 75 gallon sps tank. I did it over 6 months by using my water siphon hose to remove some sand every time I did a water change. The tank had no changes in chemistry or ill effects.

 

[exnisstech]

I removed sand from a 180g tank. I did it gradually by syphoning the sand out during water changes.

 

[Randy Holmes-Farley]

The sand is not causing zero nitrate. if feeding more cannot raise the levels to your target range, I'd suggest dosing.

FWIW, I like the look of sand.

 

[Dom]

The sand is not causing zero nitrate. if feeding more cannot raise the levels to your target range, I'd suggest dosing.

FWIW, I like the look of sand.

I went bare bottom on a tank once. It isn't for me.

 

[capt_alaver]

I love the look of sand as well, to be fair, but it's troublesome to say the least.

 

[Randy Holmes-Farley]

I love the look of sand as well, to be fair, but it's troublesome to say the least.

Maybe. Or maybe it is being falsely accused. lol

 

[capt_alaver]

Fair enough. Haha.

But for real though, I would dose NO3/PO4 up to 10ppm and 0.10ppm respectively every day and it would be back to 0 the following day. Where is it going?!

I have no mechanical or chemical filtration in here, just the rocks and sand. Figured removing sand might help, but since it wont, maybe I should just leave it alone.

 

[Uncle99]

Lot of surface area being sacrificed
How to you get nutrients to zero?
You must have some as you have living things producing ammonia?

 

[capt_alaver]

I miss the type of nitrate issues that less feeding and water changes solved.

 

[capt_alaver]

Lot of surface area being sacrificed
How to you get nutrients to zero?
You must have some as you have living things producing ammonia?

I wish I knew

I really didn't want to introduce fish in here but relented. The test results were still 0 but corals did start looking much better.

 

[Randy Holmes-Farley]

Fair enough. Haha.

But for real though, I would dose NO3/PO4 up to 10ppm and 0.10ppm respectively every day and it would be back to 0 the following day. Where is it going?!

I have no mechanical or chemical filtration in here, just the rocks and sand. Figured removing sand might help, but since it wont, maybe I should just leave it alone.

The phosphate may partly bind to the sand until you saturate it, but the nitrate is likely going into organisms.

 

[Uncle99]

I wish I knew

I really didn't want to introduce fish in here but relented. The test results were still 0 but corals did start looking much better.

I wish I had that problem.
Easy to bump up, hard to get down

 

[vahegan]

I have been fighting phosphate for around a decade. Once I removed the sand a few years ago, the phosphate has never been over 0.1ppm - actually, sometimes I have to dose phosphate, when it goes as low as 0.01ppm