+1. Using old sand without cleaning it is like putting on dirty underwear before your honeymoon night.
Seriously, the grossest stuff in your entire tank is in the sandbed. I personally would use old sand only after bleaching, rinsing multiple times, and drying/baking in the sun.
You can add about a cup of your old sand to "seed" new sand to give the living organisms a head start, but that's all I would do.
Rinsing it well should be OK, I'm just a little more of an overcautious type when it comes to sand... I guess I still remember what the sand smelled like when I took down my 75g after it was up a few months. That was DISGUSTING.
cr500_af;566273 wrote: +1. Using old sand without cleaning it is like putting on dirty underwear before your honeymoon night.
Seriously, the grossest stuff in your entire tank is in the sandbed. I personally would use old sand only after bleaching, rinsing multiple times, and drying/baking in the sun.
You can add about a cup of your old sand to "seed" new sand to give the living organisms a head start, but that's all I would do.
That is the best line EVER!
To be on topic though definitely rinse it. Removing the rock you will stir up alot of funk just by doing that. Stirring the sand up well after rock removal will also release alot of trapped goodness and you can syphon alot of it out making the rinse time shorter. Be sure if you are adding more sand to add that first so that the established sand can be on top and minimize die off of the sandbed and help keep the tank cycle down
When you start pulling the sand out (which may look pretty clean right now), you will see what everyone is talking about.
Transferring sand without cleaning it VERY WELL is a very quick way to negate all of your hard work and nuke your entire tank (or at the very least cause a ton of problems you don't want to deal with).
I have never transferred sand. Always just tossed it and bought new. Maybe I'm throwing money away and/or overly cautious, but I do know that I gave a guy in WI 80# of sand a year ago when I did a tank move and he put it in his tank after "a brief rinsing because it looked clean" and everything was dead within 2 days. Dude lost like $2k in livestock over the dumbest mistake ever...
