live rock or crushed coral?

[evieb]

:help: I want to start a reef/fish aquarium and need help. I have a 55 gal. aquarium with live rock and one fish. My question is when reading "how to begin" or "set up" live sand is recommended. I have crushed coral in mine. Is that o.k.? I haven't been at this very long at all and need help. Thanks, evie :notsure:

 

[sato]

Crushed coral will be fine, Live Sand is essentially just crushed coral or sand from an established tank and you usually only add maybe 5-10lbs of it to a tank to help seed it with the essential bacterias.

 

[bdhough]

Crushed coral is just a substrate. After a couple of years of keeping your tank you may run into nitrate problems as the bigger rubble tends to trap more waste in it than the finer sand. I would not waste your money on live sand at this point. Live sand jsut means that it has beneficial bacteria already growing on it like live rock has. If you would like to purchase a little bit of it from an established tank and add it a cup at a time to your tank then go for it. But do not buy the bag of live sand as its essentially uncured live rock and will pollute your tank.

 

[turningtim]

JMO, Get rid of the CC now before you go any further. You will have problems with the CC down the road and it dosen't sound like your that far along in the set-up. I got a 4yr old est tank (pre-owned) and couldn't get the trates below 40ppm. Finally someone on the boards helped me out. I removed all the CC and put in 1/2 argo and 1/2 prepack LS. I have a 50 which is the same footprint as your 55. I used almost 80lbs of sand (2"-3"). This is not nessesary but I like the deep sand bed. If I had it to do over again I would do 3/4 argo and 1/4 LS. By the time my LS was shipped the argo was already seeded by my LR.
I pulled everthing out when I did the switch but there are many threads of folks doing in sections.
Again JMO
Tim