Adding more sand

[c_man7]

I have about 5-10lbs of caribsea aragonite left over I forgot to finish adding to the tank. I got side tracked with the leak, then the noisy drain. The tank is filled and running now. Whats the best way to add more sand to a tank with out kicking up alot of dust and clouding the water? And tricks? I was thinking getting a larger diameter pipe and pouring the sand down the pipe straight to the bottom.

[brandon429]

you blast rinse the new sand over and over until it cannot cloud, then add with a pvc pipe or as a baggie you set underwater then slowly release. rinsing never sterilizes the sand, the bacteria remain and the silt is gone. you can easily rinse old used sandbeds totally free of waste just the same, and put them back in the reef with bacteria still present and still filtering, just minus the waste originally there. I just did this last nite, blast rinse it.

[SantaMonica]

Yea if you do the long tube trick, and just slowly let the new sand in over several days, any clouding will be very little.

[holy carp]

I've used Brandon's trick. I filled a bucket 1/3 with live sand and then ran it under tap water for about 5 minutes while gently stirring it up with my hand until all the 'fines' had run off - basically anything that stayed in the water column was eventually flushed out, and anything heavy enough to settle at a reasonable rate stayed in the bucket. I carefully drained it, rinsed it briefly with some RO water just to get any residual chlorine off, drained it again, and added it to the tank. I didn't even use the pipe trick - I just scooped it in with a pint sized container to eliminate splashing. Since the small stuff was rinsed away, all the sand settled in about a minute and the water was as clear as it had been before the addition. Even if the sand became partially sterilized, it didn't matter because I already had plenty of live sandbed and rock in the tank already.