To substrate or bare it all?
- Thread starter Frostyfish
- Start date
Bottoms with substrate look much better IMO. I read an article that strongly opposed sand beds or other substrate and the author's selling points were the lack of phosphate and nitrate build up, easy detritus removal, and live rock was sufficient enough for the bacteria colonies to perform phosphate and nitrate reduction. He or she also blamed sand beds for most tank crashes that happen after the two year mark. What I took out of it was, yeah that is possible but more than likely it happened because of poor vacuuming, sand cuc, and general maintenance. Lemme know what thoughts are on this
Well I think it's just preference for looks, I think if you plan for it and do it right it'll look good I've seen super nice bb tanks. But as maintenance goes I had a bb nano that I liked but the deitrus build up does make it look bad and I'm not on top of my tanks as I should be so I dumped in sand and haven't done another bb since.
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Ive done bare bottoms for freshwater but with my saltwater I put a fairly deep sand band because I intended to have fish that utilize the sand band for burrows and glad I did. All the talk about build of nutrients and such in the sand bed can easily be fixed by one of two simple things, either vacum parts of your sand bed on a fairly regular basis or have a few fish that constantly move and turn over the sand, which then keeps the sand fairly clean and sifted. I have a jawfish and an engineer goby. The jawfish turns over a small amount of the sand in a few places but the engineer has turned over every bit of sand in my tank many times over and keeps a two foot burrow constantly dug out under the majority of the rocks.
I have both and while the look is different, I can't say one is better than the other. Having done a lot of diving I will say that you usually don't see a deep sand base anyway, only a flat, usually packed down surface with some rubble or small rocks near the reef. I do know that my 3" substrate tank does not have the hair algae issues that the bare bottom does. But that gave me the reason to add a Sea Hare and it's both fun and amazing watching him clean it up. I have built an upflow algae scrubber in my sump and when he has the tank clean I let him clean that off. As far as aquascaping I've had no problem with rocks on a bare bottom. I haven't had a rock slid yet - 1 1/2 years). It's really a matter of personal preference,[attachment=66965:name]