stagnant fuge question (1 Viewer)

[Llama]

Quick question:

Sand bed has been sitting stagnant in my fuge since Thursday. Wet, but no flow. Still good or toss it and start fresh?

 

[crvz]

what are you going to do with the sand? Just leave it there? In general, it should be alright.

 

[cstewart79]

agreed, my fuge has very little flow at the actual sand bed so I would not worry too much especially if the critters are still alive.

 

[Llama]

Thanks for the input. I took out all the sand and water so I could give the fuge a good cleaning. So for right now it's sitting in a bucket with the remaining water. Added enough water to allow me to put the pump back down into the fuge to let it start cycling. Ran out of water before I could fully fill the fuge though. Think I'm going to rinse the sand in the bucket tomorrow and see how it looks. I'll also go to the LFS to pick up some water and maybe a bag of dry sand since I lost some in the move. After that I'll do some cleaning and scrapping of the DT and let it do it's thing for a while. Wanna take this one slow and steady to make sure I have a nice home when it comes time to tranfer everything out of my 46.

 

[chriskb3]

I would definietly rinse it out very well before re-using it. You could save a small cups worth of un-cleaned sand to re-seed.

When rinsing sand out, I found it easier to do it a little at a time in a bucket. fill with water, swish/stir and dump dirty water. Repeat until water runs clear.

 

[Llama]

I decided to go fresh sand across the board. Picked up a bag of sugar sand and a small bag of live sand (I know I know, could have just used a cup of sand from my 46 to seed it. I'm sure I'll end up doing it but I wanted to see how this turned out.) My LFS was out of miracle mud so I went on ahead with out that.

DSB is now in the fuge and everything is flowing.

My question is should I wait until the cycle (if I have one) is complete before adding any macro?

 

[chriskb3]

I would wait a week or more until adding any macro. My experience is that macro does not do well during the cycling process because of the lack of phosphates (generated from feeding fish), and will slowly die back until there are enough nutrients to feed it.

 

[Llama]

Good info.

I've been watching the water params (checking every other day) since I set it up and never saw a spike at all. So I decided to add macro over the weekend. So far everything is looking great!

Thanks for all the input guys