going insane choosing sand for new setup

[Jamielands]

hi! long time reader, first time poster. i currently have a 20g long planted tank with panda cory. i am upgrading to a 60 gallon as soon as i get the substrate figured out. its going to be a dirted tank like my 20g, but i want to find a sand that will be safe for the cory and preferably dark in color. i currently have tahitian moon sand, and while my pandas seem to have been fine on it the last 2 years, i had emailed caribsea to ask them and they advised me to stay away from TMS for cory. so i want to try something else for the sand cap.

petco had nothing. petsmart had caribsea sand in sunset gold, but it was the wet one thats supposed to have bacteria in it, so it was even more expensive than just the dry sand. i looked into play sand as well, i was in home depot earlier and picked up a bag of Sakrete Natural Play Sand for $3. the texture looks nice and its not too light for my taste, almost the same color as sunset gold. So i called Sakrete customer service to ask what the sand was made of, and where it comes from. He told me its an all natural, naturally occurring sand that they collect, screen and wash. they collect it from 'various local quarries, depending on the area". As soon as i mentioned the word 'aquarium' the guy went crazy and i got "No no no no absolutely do NOT use this in your aquarium, it will kill all your fish. you have to buy aquarium sand from the pet store.". I've been researching like crazy and can't decide what to buy!! every option seems to have people on both sides, some saying safe, others saying unsafe. I'm going completely nuts here!!!!!!!!!! can anyone offer an opinion?!

[yayfish24]

I use play sand in a few of my tanks. I like it a lot. It looks good and is very cheap. Just be sure to rinse it extremely well.

[bekateen]

I use QUIKRETE brand play sand in about half of my tanks and the fish love it; I know others on this site use this brand, too. I used to have QUIKRETE in all of my tanks, except that my banjos would stir it up into the water column and some would get sucked into my power filter (which I fear could hurt the motor).

I would expect that as long as your filtration system doesn't suck in any of the sand, play sand (washed) should be fine. I imagine that the guy on the phone told you not to use it in aquariums to avoid liability, but that's just a guess.

Good luck, Eric

[Jamielands]

i wonder if the quikrete sands are similar. i really like the look of the playsand i bought, but the guy on the phone spooked me a little, telling me it'll raise my pH and nuke my fish. it looks really natural and super soft and fine but with different variations going through it. i rinsed a small amount about 5 times and the water is clear and the sand settles right back down when disturbed. i was all ready to start rinsing it, then that guy made me nervous. i wondered if maybe it was just for liability purposes, but i'm a little spooked. tried to get some pics with my crummy phone:

[bekateen]

I suppose you could do a little test: If you have the ability to test pH, first check water in a bucket, by itself. Then add a bunch of sand to the same water, stir it well, leave it a few days (maybe stir it every day, although I don't know if it will matter), and then check pH again at the end. That's not very scientific, but if it's going to change, I would imagine it might show up.

[Jamielands]

i just tested it now. tap water: 7.0, current tank:7.2, sample (after an hour): 7.6.

I'm finding this so frustrating! i don't want to buy a new play sand and test it to find out it fails too and have a hundred pounds of useless sand. i know some people use black blasting sand? theres a local place that sells Black Beauty in medium, fine and superfine grit. but i don't know if that would be inert, or soft enough. Has anyone used this? (specifically black beauty, not black diamond). maybe i can get a sample.

maybe ill just shell out big bucks for sunset gold? argh!

[PlecosAndLoaches]

Don't waste your money on expensive aquarium sand. Keep looking on this site - there are lots of threads covering this topic. For what it's worth, I've rarely, if ever, heard of anyone crashing their tank or killing fish because they used the play sand available at Home Depot. Likely you were talking to someone more focused on liability. I use play sand and I also use pool filter sand available at any pool supply store - a bit more expensive than play sand and more coarse so not optimal for corys (in my opinion) but great for loaches, plecos and the like (again, in my opinion). With any sand - but particularly for the play sand from Home Depot because it is a finer grain - the only thing you have to worry about is too much of it getting into your filters, but that's manageable with sponge pre-filters and placing the filter intakes farther up in the water column. Good luck.

[Bas Pels]

Being a chemist, I have found that solids in a tank need time, lots of time, to settle to a certain pH. That is, if you take sand from a pH = 8,0 tank, and put it in a bucket, the water in this bucket will go to pH = 8, regardless the pH it used to have.

If you would add some oak extract, the pH in the water will drop, and then come back again to pH = 8 - but not precisely the 8,0 it used to be, it will be slightly less.

I think, if one would take the time, one could use a bucket, say a 2 gallon bucket, add 2 pounds of sand and top it off with water @ pH = 5,0. The whole would, in a week, find an equilibrium at a certain pH - which will now be the sands pH. If it is too high, one could add fresh acidic water

In a populated tank this is not an option, as the fish will never be able to cope with the dramatic pH changes, but in preparing this is possible.

Still, it will take an awful lot of work, and this explains why book generally say it is not practical to do such things. But they are possible.

[catfishchaos]

I would go with ADA cosmetic sand although it hurst the wallet a little its definitely worth it!

[MChambers]

I think the play sand would be fine. I don't use it because it can get sucked up into your filters pretty easily. I use pool filter sand instead. It may not be optimal for Corydoras as PlecosandLoaches said, but it is fine for them.

[dw1305]

Hi all,
The sand you have pictured looks like very suitable, but it may be marine sand. The salt isn't a problem, but it is likely to have shell fragments in it (as well as silica). Mollusc shell is calcium carbonate (CaCO3) and will raise pH to ~pH8 (this is the pH value at which HCO3- and atmospheric CO2 (400ppm) are in equilibrium), and act as a carbonate buffer.

I've removed a lot of the shell fragments from sea sand by sieving the dry sand through a 2mm soil sieve, followed by "gold panning". The sieving removes the larger shell fragments. Smaller shell fragments are less dense than the silica sand and can be carefully scooped from the top of the a sand water mix, after it has been swirled around (like panning for gold). The resulting cleaned sand can be acid washed (with citric acid) to remove the remaining small shell fragments. I lost about 2/3 of what I started with, but the remaining 1/3 was carbonate free.

Both "pool filter sand" and "play sand" should be 100% silica sand, and are inert. I like a pre-filter to keep sand out of the impeller, details here: <"http://www.planetcatfish.com/forum/view ... er#p288643">.

cheers Darrel

[bekateen]

i just tested it now. tap water: 7.0, current tank:7.2, sample (after an hour): 7.6.

I'm finding this so frustrating! i don't want to buy a new play sand and test it to find out it fails too and have a hundred pounds of useless sand. i know some people use black blasting sand? theres a local place that sells Black Beauty in medium, fine and superfine grit. but i don't know if that would be inert, or soft enough. Has anyone used this? (specifically black beauty, not black diamond). maybe i can get a sample.

maybe ill just shell out big bucks for sunset gold? argh!

As long as the fish aren't subjected to sudden pH shifts, I don't think it would harm your corys to be housed in water at 7.6, although admittedly that is a bit on the high side; there is at least one reported panda spawn in the BLOG reports at pH 7.6, so that's a good sign.

More importantly, a one hour test may be too short to really tell you anything. I'm concerned that the implication of your finding might be something like this: "If the pH rose to 7.6 in just one hour, then it will keep going up with every passing hour." While the pH may still rise, keep in mind (as others have pointed out) that the pH will stabilize. It doesn't matter what the pH is at one hour unless that is the stabilized pH (which I wouldn't expect to be so). If I were you, I would let that sand and water sit for several days, and test pH day after day to see when it stabilizes and at what value. That way, you know how high the pH might get; and unless other factors change in your tank (water, etc), then pH should be somewhat stable near that value.

In my tanks with play sand substrates, I used to have trouble keeping the pH up high enough. It would start around 7 and drift downward, sometimes into the 5 range over a period of days. I had to add stuff to the water to keep it in the mid-upper 6 range for my fish. I think it was the driftwood that was the main culprit for the pH drop, because now that the wood is older, I no longer have that steadily dropping pH problem. Honestly, I think my fish like the lower pH, because my Apistos spawned like crazy back then, and now they spawn less often. On the other hand, now my tanks are in the low 7 range, and I'm still getting spawns from my clowns, albino BNs, and corys, so I'm just leaving the pH where it is, rather than trying to change it.

Good luck, Eric

[dw1305]

Hi all,

As long as the fish aren't subjected to sudden pH shifts, I don't think it would harm your corys to be housed in water at 7.6, although admittedly that is a bit on the high side; there is at least one reported panda spawn in the BLOG reports at pH 7.6, so that's a good sign.

You won't get rapid pH changes from the calcium carbonate (CaCO3) in shell fragments in sand, or the pH value rising above ~pH8.

I think what effect it has on the fish would depend upon species. I would expect that

Corydoras

species from "white water" near the Andes Piedmont, (like

Corydoras panda

) would be tolerant of higher pH, because the waters they occur in will contain some carbonates etc from the Andes. "Black water" in the Amazon basin, and "clear water" flowing from ancient shield rocks, would be very, very low in carbonates.

Technically carbonates are insoluble in water, they only go into solution at all because of the dissolved CO2. This is why when you boil a kettle of hard water (high dKH) "limescale" is deposited. Gas solubility is temperature dependent (as temperature rises solubility declines) and as you approach boiling all the gases (including CO2) are lost from the water, and the carbonates come out of solution. Less soluble carbonates (like CaCO3) will come out first.

cheers Darrel

[Jamielands]

Thanks everyone for the input. After considering all your responses I decided to suck it up and buy the sunset gold sand. I don't want to worry about ph issues. I don't want to risk another bad play sand, and pool sand isn't ideal. After more research I found the manufacturer describes the black blasting sand as "sharp, angular particles", so that's out. My Cory are too precious to me not to justify spending the money on sand I can feel confident about. I want to give them the best environment I can provide. I drove all over today and finally found a fish store that carried what I wanted, and they're a small store so I feel good about supporting a local business over a chain store. I'll probably still test the ph of the play sand i bought after a week or two, just for the heck of it.

I'll have to post a pic of my tank after it's cycled and my fish are moved in. Again, thanks for the opinions, they definitely helped me make a decision.

[VelcroWY]

I almost always buy "Black Diamond Blasting Sand" from a hardware or farm supply store.
It's black and less than $10 for 50 lbs.

[Jamielands]

I almost always buy "Black Diamond Blasting Sand" from a hardware or farm supply store.
It's black and less than $10 for 50 lbs.

I can't find the black diamond anywhere around here. Only "black beauty", and their website describes the particles as angular and sharp. So that's a bummer, I love the Iook of black.

[VelcroWY]

Sorry I did not respond right away, life interfered. Black Diamond is sold at Tractor Supply and I'm not sure who else sells it but there are other places, I am sure. I just like that brand.

I've also recently purchased some pool sand from Ace and from True Value. This is mentioned above, I believe. It is very nice and clean and white. It will provide a nice contrast for certain fish. It's probably even cleaner than Black Diamond because we all know pools are for rich folk and they don't want to have to clean their sand. LOL Both forms are less than $10 per 40 lbs. I just can't see buying substrate in a fish store, especially sand for my corys.

[TwoTankAmin]

I have a pool and the sand has to be replaced every few years due to wear. Angular grains work best to prap wastes. As the sand gets roiled about in the filter over a few years it becomes more rounded. This makes it less effective and then it gets changed.

Black beauty is very sharp. I bought a 100 pound bag years ago. It was very cheap, so it didn't hurt much to have to throw it away. The other thing about sand is grain size. The smaller that is, the more likely it is to go up a siphon. When the poop is heavier than the sand, it will be hard to vacuum a tank.

In a populated tank this is not an option, as the fish will never be able to cope with the dramatic pH changes, but in preparing this is possible.

This is not quite true. I leearned this when I began keeping Altums. I went to visit a smaller scale importer and spent a few hours in his fish room. While there I watched him drop the pH in a number of tanks by one full point or a bit more in a matter of minutes. I could see this because he moved his digital monitor into each tank first to see the current pH, then he added the muriatic acid directly to the water and I watched that meters as the pH went down rapidly.

Since then I have done the same in my altum angel tank. I think how much and how rapid a change in pH affects any given species varies. I would never try this with a rift lake cichlid for example. This is just another example of how little in this hobby is truly universal.

[Mol_PMB]

Sand with a constant grain size is less prone to compaction and anoxic problems than sand with a mix of grain sizes. It doesn't matter so much whether the grain size is small or large.
Personally I would choose an inert graded sand.
The cost of substrate is negligible compared to the cost of tank, equipment, fish, electricity etc. Why try to save a few £ or $ on sand in the grand scheme of things? It's false economy.