Finally got my South Down sand...

[FishHead1]

I've had my 180 running for 18 months with about 1/2" of coarsely crushed coral. I finally got my hands on some South Down sand. Where do I start? Should I remove the little bit of substrate I have? Just dump the sand on top? How do I rinse this stuff?
Any advice is greatly appreciated.

 

[Carpentersreef]

smcnulty,
this link has some great advice on starting a DSB (look for SPC's post): What is an established tank?

Mitch

 

[sunset pizza]

I just switched out my cc with southdown about 6 weeks ago. I have a 29 gal tank so it wasn't too big a project. I took all my live rock out and then removed all the cc. At that point my fish were still in the tank. I have no corals. I have read that it is ok to leave them in the tank but as I started to add the sand, the water got really cloudy and the fish freaked out. So I took them out and put them in with the rock which also had a powerhead for circulation. then I was pretty free to do what I wanted. I added all the sand and did not rinse it first. Again I have read that the very fine silt is actually good. I then used some panthose to make balls of crushed coral to seed the sand. I even dug through the crushed coral and picked out some little "bugs" and stuff I found and put them into the tank. I had to add back the rock and fish before i went to bed even though the visiblity was no more than 1-2" into the tank. The next afternoon when I got home from work though things were looking better. It took about a week or so of constant 'dusting' of the rocks and powerheads to finally get everything cleaned up. the glass was filthy as was the power filter I've got in there. But eventually everything got back to normal. I'm going to take out the nylon balls this week I think. I 've had a bit of algae growth on the sand but it seems to go away after a couple of days and sprout up elsewhere. right now it looks great! Thanks to everyone out there who gave me advice when I did this project.

a couple last ideas:
make up plenty of saltwater ahead of time.
i changed out over the course of 2 days about 12 gal. (29 gal tank)

Have big enough containers to hold your live rock in completely submerged in your old tank water. remember a powerhead.

Have a LOT of towels handy!

Get someone to help you out. my wife was a big help to me.

I started the project at 3pm. do yourself a favor and give yourself an entire day!

Good luck!

 

[cat23]

I did the same thing. Took out all the cc with a net. Then added sand. If you use a piece of PVC, you can pour it in and let it in kind of slowly. Don't even worry about the poof though. You'll get it no matter what you do. It'll settle in a couple days. Wish I would have known about the stocking ting. That's a great way to save some sandbed critters.

Have fun!