sandbed maintenance? What is yours - and who does it?

[Jakesaw]

I'm trying to decide if I should be vacuuming or maintaining my sand in any way.  It's white, but whenever ti stirs up there is particulate in the water column.  Been leaving it alone for a year  3  months.  Should I be Siphon vacuuming it frequently / periodically?

 

My sandbed is pretty shallow btw

 

what is your routine - experience - opinions?

Thanks

[Firefish15]

I generally vacuum my whole sand bed whenever I do a water change, usually about once or twice a month. Mine is about 2” deep though, it benefits from the attention. 
I’ll smooth it out afterwards to eliminate the piles from the siphon vacuum.

[debbeach13]

I vacuum whatever sand I can which is about half of the sand bed every water change. 

[Jakesaw]

I cleaned about 1/3 of my sandbed today on a water change.  HOLY SNIKEES BATMAN !  

 

That was some nasty stuff in there.  Tons of black sediment in there.  Can't believe I let the sand set so long without as much as a thought of cleaning it.    I'll clean the rest of sand over next 2 or 3 weeks.  Will be interesting to see what my Nitrates / Phos do with sandbed vacuumed and how the corals like or don't like the new water quality. 

 

My orange encrusting I know does not like it.  He got burried in the vacuum process, pulled him out to place on top of sandbed.  The Talbot damsel had to re-arrange the sandbed to his liking.  And of course -- re-burried the encrusting coral fully again. 

 

2 frag rescues in 1 day.

[TheKleinReef]

I gave up on maintaining reefflakes, I  just  let the diamond goby do it now.

 

[Jakesaw]

50 minutes ago, TheKleinReef said:

I gave up on maintaining reefflakes, I  just  let the diamond goby do it now.

 

My 10 gallon is too small for diamond goby. 

 

But.... after all the crud that came out of my sand, he probably could have eaten well for a few weeks!!!

[NanoGrant]

I also vacuum my sandbed at each water change. 
 

It’s amazing how much build up in there. Although I do worry I’m removing some micro fauna such as pods, eggs etc but it’s the lesser of two evils I think.

[Toomanymatts]

1/4 of the sand at water change.  I just added a pistol shrimp though recently.  not sure i'm going to need to anymore, he pretty much turns it all over every 24 hours lol.

[Alexraptor]

Critters and microfauna seem to make the world of a difference. Finding my 25g reef has extensive metal sulfide deposites in its "shallow" sandbed. Honestly not quite sure what to do about it, if there's any way one can break up the stuff without removing all the sand? I really don't want to have to tear things apart, and the corals are healthy. That said, this tank was the subject of some pretty aggressive options to eliminate nuisance algae, from flat out chemical nuking attempt, to 3-month long total blackout.

 

In contrast, my 15g reef has been operating at least as long, and has piles of light brown deposits of detritus, but no pockets of black/dead sand to be found anywhere. Plenty of tube worms in the sand bed and what not, though.