Cleaning live sand and bottoms?

[gkotlin]

How do you clean your aquarium floor. I have a new 92 thats finshing the cycle. Have a lot of brown die off from my live rock on the sand base. I have the fine light colored aragalive sand. How do you keep it clean? I can vacuum the bottom, but I get a bunch of the sand as well and it takes a while. I can stir it up, but most of it settles before heading off to the filter and then is just spread out on the bottom. I don't have a cleaning crew in there yet, but I don't know how much of that stuff is able to be eaten. Please share all your dirty, or clean the dirty secrets.....

 

[tizzo]

For a sand bottum your over all current should be strong enough to keep anything from settling on the bottum. If you hafta stir it up, using a turkey baster to blast it (sorta gently though) should pick it up off the bottum.

 

[scotts]

If you are just finishing cycling your tank you proabably have what is called diatoms, they are just part of your cycling process and are probably dead now. So you can use the turkey baster to just blow them away. You do not want to vacuum your sand because then you are sucking up the good bacteria in your sand. A clean up crew will help keep your sand bed clean. You can do a search on her for diatoms if you want more info about them.

 

[oceanists]

A Suffecient clean up crew is what you need they will get rid of that for you , , jsust dont vacuum the sand that is the worst thing to do

 

[aredmon]

I am going through the same brown stuff problem. I was tring to find something to munch it up. I read on this sight that cerith snailes do a pretty good job at that. Everyone told me that it will eventualy go away on its own.

 

[brolik1]

Originally Posted by aredmon
I am going through the same brown stuff problem. I was tring to find something to munch it up. I read on this sight that cerith snailes do a pretty good job at that. Everyone told me that it will eventualy go away on its own.
For a new tank this does happen.The clean up that worked for me was(i have a 20g)4 nass snails,4 margarita snails,2 turbo snails,5 hermits,and 2 coral banded shrimp.My tank had red slime on the rock,on the surface of the sand.I also had a powder like algae on the surface of the sand that looked ugly and it started creating little mounts on the sand,but my clean up crew attacked it and with some water changes it went away.