Praise be to silica pool filter sand!

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MultipleTankSyndrome
Posts: 124
Joined: Thu Sep 30, 2021 11:07 am
Location: Loachaholica

Praise be to silica pool filter sand!

Post by MultipleTankSyndrome » Sun Oct 30, 2022 9:25 am

I just thought I'd give a shout out to how great silica pool filter sand is as a substrate. Ever since I started using it for my substrate back in November 2021, there was never the slighest glance back.
These are the reasons why:

-Small, dense, and uniformly sized grains. The small grain size and density allows detritus to stay on top where it can be filtered or vacuumed out instead of sinking in and rotting, and the uniformity ensures good circulation throughout instead of packed anaerobic areas.

-Smooth grains. In fact, even smooth enough for kuhli loaches to sift sand through their gills, instead of being sharp and damaging like many gravels and some play sands can be.

-Excess silt is very cooperative. When you have larger (such as 473 liter) tanks, it's not practical to rinse the entirety of the sand that will be going in, and this is where the cooperation of the excess silt comes in.
I have added it to both established tanks and a new tank that was being set up with excellent results. In the established tank the silt clouded the water fully at first but was removed in short order by the filters+water replacements, and in the new tank the silt simply settled into the sand as the tank was being filled, without clouding the water at all!

-Great prices. It's not a fancy, high-demand product like colored play sand, and the prices reflect this - if I remember correctly, I paid only about 25$ to get enough for my over 1000 liters of tanks.

-Looks just like the sand found in the wild. For example, here's an underwater image of the Asian areas where loaches are found.
Image
https://hknature.weebly.com/fish.html

As you can see, it compares very favorably to my silica pool filter sand.
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It's even a good match for other areas like the Amazon. So you don't have to have loaches for this upside, other fish can benefit too!
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And my Amazonian fish look lovely over it in my opinion.
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Anyone else with silica pool filter sand substrate enjoy it as much as I?
473 liter - pictus catfish, smallscale archerfish, planned pumpkinseed sunfish
110 liter - green neon+cardinal tetras
473 liter - roseline sharks, striped kuhli+black kuhli+Burmese loaches, zebra/weather/neon kuhli loaches (planned)

NancyD
Posts: 1608
Joined: Thu Jan 05, 2006 9:17 pm
Location: SF bay area,US

Re: Praise be to silica pool filter sand!

Post by NancyD » Sun Oct 30, 2022 9:55 pm

I have used pool filter sand in several tanks with good results. There are different "grades" of PFS. The "usual" is 20 grade (we used it in our swimming pool filter). It's a bit big for small sand sifters. I used both 20 grade & #1 (I think similar to grade 10); #0 was very fine & almost dusty in size. I was allowed to run my fingers through both #1 & #0 & chose #1 for ease of vacuuming. I didn't think it was any "better" compared to my 20 grade "usual" as far as pangios went but species of tiny loaches might have enjoyed it more, hard to tell. I never saw my pangios "sand sift" in the way I think of that with either.(no gill spewing of sand). If we say that "sifting" is in the mouth & out their mouth then either was ok. Sand "diggers" (burrowers) were fine with either, too coarse & they may not have gone as deep as with finer but I didn't really notice a difference in the loach species I kept.

I also saw that with cichlids that often "gill spew" sand didn't do that with any substrate too big. They did more of a "chew & spit" with larger substrate. I believe fish can decide what size substrate they prefer & act accordingly.

Ease of cleaning is always a plus! With the finer sand I did lose some (not much) each water change & vacuum. A better vac technique made that much less. My worst substrate was Flourite black sand in a shrimp tank. Very fine & dusty...& I had to try to rescue tiny shrimplets sucked into the bucket...but that would have been the same with any substrate, they were attracted to all the "goodies" getting vacuumed out. Talk about eye strain! I eventually quit stressing about a few tiny shrimp I didn't save every time.
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MultipleTankSyndrome
Posts: 124
Joined: Thu Sep 30, 2021 11:07 am
Location: Loachaholica

Re: Praise be to silica pool filter sand!

Post by MultipleTankSyndrome » Sun Oct 30, 2022 11:01 pm

No idea what grade mine is, I threw away the bags and didn't look for the grade size on them.
Default assumption would be 20 grade, it's not all that small (eg: individual grains visible when some is accidentally vacuumed up into cleaning bucket).

By sand sifting, I did mean spewing through gills, yes. What species you had probably played a part, having striped and black together I only see the black do it. Not yet the striped.
Size of the grains is not a problem for them either. The grains do look much larger than one would expect them to look relative to the size of a gill spewing fish, but they seem totally unbothered by it.

Never had any species of cichlid but that makes total sense. It's hard on the gills to spew out substrates like gravel, even small grades.

One more benefit I completely forgot to mention is that the water (and resultant oxygen) circulation throughout all the uniform grains makes pool filter sand a fabulous biomedia/biofilter, especially compared to a bare tank (which IMHO have no place at all for any fish anyway).
The amount of surface area between all those grains that nitrifying bacteria colonize is humongous, which makes the actual filter media much, much, much less 'vulnerable' to events like the filter crapping out or a very vigorous cleaning that might rinse a lot of bacterial biofilm off. It also doesn't need to be occasionally rinsed out like filter biomedia, because as mentioned it always keeps detritus on top instead of occasionally getting gunked up like filter biomedia.
473 liter - pictus catfish, smallscale archerfish, planned pumpkinseed sunfish
110 liter - green neon+cardinal tetras
473 liter - roseline sharks, striped kuhli+black kuhli+Burmese loaches, zebra/weather/neon kuhli loaches (planned)

MultipleTankSyndrome
Posts: 124
Joined: Thu Sep 30, 2021 11:07 am
Location: Loachaholica

Re: Praise be to silica pool filter sand!

Post by MultipleTankSyndrome » Mon Oct 31, 2022 9:48 pm

MultipleTankSyndrome wrote:
Sun Oct 30, 2022 11:01 pm
By sand sifting, I did mean spewing through gills, yes. What species you had probably played a part, having striped and black together I only see the black do it. Not yet the striped.
Size of the grains is not a problem for them either. The grains do look much larger than one would expect them to look relative to the size of a gill spewing fish, but they seem totally unbothered by it.
Update to this. I saw one of my 'striped' kuhlis doing a small amount of gill spewing sand. It wasn't nearly the amount that the black kuhlis gill spew though.
'Striped' in quotations because I'm 99% sure it's P. alterans instead of P. semicincta, which I purchased it as. The caveat to that is that most don't have this species, so it's not necessarily representative of whether or not the much more commonly sold P. semicincta does it.

Also, at the same time I saw the P. alterans gill spewing sand, I surprisingly saw one of my roseline sharks do it as well. Both of them were eating the same sinking pellets off the bottom of the tank, and they were eating so close to one another that the roseline shark nudged the kuhli a few times, but I would definitely not have expected it to gill spew sand.
473 liter - pictus catfish, smallscale archerfish, planned pumpkinseed sunfish
110 liter - green neon+cardinal tetras
473 liter - roseline sharks, striped kuhli+black kuhli+Burmese loaches, zebra/weather/neon kuhli loaches (planned)

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