depth of sand bed

[bbreaux1]

i was just curious to how deep most people put there sand beds and if anyone has just put maybe an inch and a half instead of 4 my tank is only 20inches tall and i dont know if i was 1/5 of the height taken up by sand.by having sand keep the detrius on top wouldnt that let the stuff get sucked up into the protien skimmer easier and be eaten by the clean up crew easier making the nitrates lower and not have to worry about the area in the dsb that if stirred up can cause some trouble supposidly. any comment would be helpful thanks

 

[javajoe]

From my understanding, a DSB must be 4-5 inches in order to be effective. I have a 55 gallon, and this was kinda hard to swallow, as it DOES take up quite a bit of the room in the tank, but after doing a lot of research, i think that the benefits of having a 4-5 inch DSB outways the fact that i lost space. I have been very happy with it. I used about 150 lbs of southdown sand, and 20 pounds of live sand from my LFS to seed it.