ls
- Thread starter topfish
- Start date
fixitdude2001
Member
Hi, Alot. You may want to go to a southdown sand that is very inexpensive and seed it with live sand about 10% . Our 200 gallon we put in I think 300 lbs of sand and 60 lbs of live sand and have also added 3lbs from one LFS and a couple of cups from another. this gave us about 6 inches for a nice deep sand bed and, the eels and gobies just love it. We whent this deep because we only have small amount of LR, we used slate rock for the hiding places. Cya....fixit 
fixitdude2001
Member
Thanks, you can go with smaller amount of sand , 4 inches is the normal but you could also think of a plenum , this would only take about 2 inches of sand, but there are pros and cons with this method, you cannot have any burrowing fish as the plenum can not be disturbed but, they work well for the right conditions, like top fish that dont swish the sand but eels and triggers and gobies do dig. For the southdown sand this can be purchased from stores that are close to any seashore , this sand is sold as play sand and, must be clean of any chemicals. this sand can be hard to find if you dont live in the areas that sell it. I am one of the unlucky ones but, Before my accident I used to haul washed and dried sand and this is what I used for my base sand and added live sand to it , works great...hope this helps....fixit
mark-24
Member
Welcome back fixit!!! Hope your doin better. But SouthDown Tropical play sand (and yes the tropical makes a huge differance), is a type of well play sand sold from Home Depots, but only on the east coast, that is very very cheap like $3 for 50 lbs of it. It is aquarium safe, it is harvested of the coast of Bimini in the Bahamas, and has been sterilized, a downfall is that it is very very fine, and will cloud up your tank if you dont give it a good rinse 1 time.
But thats basically what I did, I bought 150 lbs of SD that I had to order from Pennsylvinia (shipping was terrible, but still paid less than 20 cents per lb), and then added 40 lbs of ls to the tank, so far so good, but it still is pretty early to tell. That's probally the best way to seed it, but lr also helps the seeding process, so will a det kit, but they can be kinda hard to find.
-Mark
But thats basically what I did, I bought 150 lbs of SD that I had to order from Pennsylvinia (shipping was terrible, but still paid less than 20 cents per lb), and then added 40 lbs of ls to the tank, so far so good, but it still is pretty early to tell. That's probally the best way to seed it, but lr also helps the seeding process, so will a det kit, but they can be kinda hard to find.
-Mark
clowning around
Member
so say...if I wanted to create my dsb with this method...how would I go about taking out my cc and replacing it without recycling the tank??? Should I put my fish in another tank while doing this process???