keeping sand alive

[baddfish]

Good morning. I have a question for you guys.
I recently bought a bunch of stuff from a guy getting out of the hobby for good, and I have about 30lbs of established sand that is in two 5gal buckets with tank water. It has an awful lot of sediment in it (probably from it being stirred up and moved) but he said the 20gal tank he had it in was healthy and un-medicated.
The sand had been in the bucket for a couple of days now. I would like to use it, but I have to work on the area for the new tank and it may take a week or two.
My question is (finally, huh!) should I treat the sand and water as if there were fish in there? Keep it heated, circulating, and watching water conditions? Or do I have to do all that stuff?

 

[d2mini]

If you can keep it indoors where it's room temperature, that should be fine. You should also keep a powerhead going so the water circulates. And see what others say but you may want to give it a quick rinse before putting in your tank because along with all the good, there's going to be a lot of bad junk too. For an 80 gal reef, I'm not so sure I'd want to use all that sand to start the new tank. I'd be more apt to use a couple cups of it just to seed a bunch of fresh sand. But see what others think.

 

[baddfish]

It would eventually go in a 25gal tank. I really didn't want to put it in the 80gal.
Wouldn't be a good idea to start a 25 with this sand, and some rock from the 80?

 

[d2mini]

Again, let's see what others say, but personally I'd be a little leary to start a new tank with all old sand because that's where all the gunk ends up that doesn't stay floating in the water column and eventually filtered out by your skimmer and water changes. This is why I suggest rinsing it. When I empty a tank and then start to scoop out sand, the remaining water becomes BLACK. Rock is different because even though it can collect some sediment, the flow of the water tends to keep it fairly clean as do the animals moving in and out of it. With rock you just have to worry about it soaking up phosphates or chemicals if the tank was treated because those can leach out later.

 

[baddfish]

It does have a lot of crap in it...I hate to waste it though.
I'm pretty sure it was in his refuge. I don't know a lot about what he had set up.

 

[little_fish]

+1 d2mini

I think you are going to have more issues than its worth than to start a tank without cleaning that sand first. Just use a cup of unrinsed stuff if you really really want to. Any sand you put in there is going to become live over time, but if you start with new, clean sand the total amount of unwanted junk is going to be less.

 

[Smitty]

+2 Dennis...keep a few cups of the old sand, but rinse the rest of it very well before placing it insude to new tank.

 

[baddfish]

Makes sense. Thanks everyone.

 

[Rufio808]

When I downgraded, my sand had tons of gunk. I cleaned my sand and you might want to do the same. The sand will become live again and your tank won't cloud up that much when being disturbed. I also think the sand might be releasing harmful things hen he was going it to you.

I put the sand in a bucket and placed a hose into the sand. I filled the bucket with water and repeated poured out the funky water by tipping the bucket.