So What Do You Think The Chances Are Of This Modified Deep Sand Bed Doing Anything Worth A Darn?

I have all this bio media that I've bought over time and been keeping in a small trash can in the garage, and adding ammonia every night to supercharge the beneficial bacteria. So I wanted to do a deep sand bed, but use up a good bit of this media.

So I put the media, which includes lava rock, ceramic rings, some of these baked clay ball things that I assume are kinda-sorta like ceramic rings, a few bio-balls, and some pumice stones at the bottom. The media I kind of overlapped in a certain way to create small plenums. Also the pumice stones I put inside some baby milk bottles to create additional small plenum spaces.

The first pic is the media all layered out in the center before I added the sand.

The second pic is with the sand added - almost complete other than I need to order a bit more sand to cover some of the bio media on the side.

Thoughts on whether this might do some good, along with *fingers crossed* some nitrate reduction?

Thanks!

 

 

 

Very interesting. Did you test your water after adding all this media and sand?

 

I have not yet Momgoose56 - I just did it today, and did a water change along with it. Will test tomorrow and post results if its anything interesting. Probably way too soon to tell thus far whether its doing anything, but more just want to make sure the massive additions didn't throw the parameters off.

 

Well, good luck with it. I use lava rock, the landscape type, as both a decoration and a habitat for bacteria. It's especially useful when I start a new tank, I just transfer a bunch of the lava rock and sand or gravel from a cycled tank into the new tank, rinse my filter media in the conditioned water in the new tank and depending on the size of the new tank and the amount of substrate I can move, I usually have a completely cycled tank in less than a week!

 

Haha, very similar to what I did with my media in the garbage can in the garage, adding a bit of ammonia each day Momgoose.

 

I like it.. I don't know if itll be useful or not but I like the outside the box thinking and the trying something new. more power to ya brother!

 

What!

No UGF plenum?

Ha

 

I like it.. I don't know if itll be useful or not but I like the outside the box thinking and the trying something new. more power to ya brother!

Thanks loyal!

 

soooo??? test results?

 

What!

No UGF plenum?

Ha

Well, I have several plenum spaces in there given my overlapping of the bags of media which will leave spaces, as well as including those white plastic baby milk bottles that are not filled up all the way with media. I figured lots of smaller plenum spaces would probably be better than one big one. I'm not sold on the whole plenum idea anyways, makes no sense to me why some huge void would be helpful - what seems logical to me is that you need deniitrification bacteria living on some media way down where oxygen cannot get to - never understood how having a plenum helps this - presumably bacteria don't live in the water in the middle of the void, but on the sand (or other media) on its outskirts - so just filling that void up with media makes sense to me, but I dunno. *shrugs*

 

Is that something where you can't disturb the deep substrate, so it remains anoxic?

What kind of sand is it? Looks darker than the pool filter sand I use.

 

Is that something where you can't disturb the deep substrate, so it remains anoxic?

What kind of sand is it? Looks darker than the pool filter sand I use.

That's right IslandVic, not disturbing the substrate at all. Sand is DEFINATELY darker than pool filter sand - its black beauty (not diamond as I may have said) blasting sand, link here:



Thanks!