I am leaning toward running a bare bottom tank this go around for ease of maintenance. All my other tanks has a thin layer of sand and I found this to hold a lot of detritus and just make maintenance more of a pain. I’m planning on siliconing a piece of textured black abs to the bottom to help with the looks. Who is running bare bottom? Post pics!
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Who is running a bare bottom tank?!? Post pictures!
- Thread starter PaulM
- Start date
I ran my 90g BB to 2 years. The bottom will get covered in coralline algae. I agree on the detritus getting trapped on the sand and that is why I went BB. It was easy to clean the bottom of the tank. I found that since I am using Real Reef Rock that is man made that I need the biological filtration that the sand provides.
Initially ran my 25g Nuvo nano as a BB after years of having 20-110 gallon tanks with sand (actually aragonite reef mix).
I thought the 25g would be easy to maintain, with proper flow detritus would be minimal then I'd just turkey-baster suck out any residing garbage.
Problems (in a reef tank, fish, coral, standard feeding)...
You get the same diatomes on the bottom of the tank you get on the glass, but you cant simply scrape them.
Areas of high flow may knock the detritus around, but propagates algae in certain regions of the tank.
Always looked dirty or moldy based on prevailing algae.
Never patient enough to let it develop into caraline.
What I did...
Added 20 pounds of sand to the tank (about 1").
Added a crew of 15 nassarius snails (love these guys).
Blow the sand with a baster every week or two, just before I do a water change, takes 2 minutes.
All looks great.
Been doing this for a while. Figured a BB would be less work, ended up being a ton more and still didn't look good.
But, I may just be c%$p at at keeping a BB.
Always worth giving it a go then you can add sand later if its not working out.
I thought the 25g would be easy to maintain, with proper flow detritus would be minimal then I'd just turkey-baster suck out any residing garbage.
Problems (in a reef tank, fish, coral, standard feeding)...
You get the same diatomes on the bottom of the tank you get on the glass, but you cant simply scrape them.
Areas of high flow may knock the detritus around, but propagates algae in certain regions of the tank.
Always looked dirty or moldy based on prevailing algae.
Never patient enough to let it develop into caraline.
What I did...
Added 20 pounds of sand to the tank (about 1").
Added a crew of 15 nassarius snails (love these guys).
Blow the sand with a baster every week or two, just before I do a water change, takes 2 minutes.
All looks great.
Been doing this for a while. Figured a BB would be less work, ended up being a ton more and still didn't look good.
But, I may just be c%$p at at keeping a BB.
Always worth giving it a go then you can add sand later if its not working out.
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Yeah that’s what happened to me.
I have a new build happening and I put fresh water just to test if the new tank can hold water. My wife said it looks good when are you going to put in the sand. I said I am not going to put any sand this time. she said that looks horrible. Why would you do that?
So I just ordered 8 40lb bags of live Carib sea sand.
Lol... you know what happens... anyway, i am growing GSP on the bottom and the back, so it’ll hoping it will look cool. Maybe you should grow something there.