Gulf Coast sand

OK, hammer away on this one. I live on the Gulf Caost of Florida, known for its sugar fine snow white sand and emerald green water. Tell me why shovelling sand straight out of the gulf into my potential reef tank is not a good idea.

Would love to hear any inputs.

 

Mobile Al. here.. We used sand from Dauphin Island and Water to set up a friends tank.
We had to add more salt to get the water right.. it still had to go thru a cycle, etc..

We ended up adding some course sand on top, as the other sand was to fine, And blow all over..
We found no hitch hikers. He had ALOT of problems, but not from the sand or water..
He didn't understand about cycling .. JMO.. I think the sand would be OK.
BUT, I wouldn't do it.. And remember, the're laws......

For me.. I didn't want to get any sand, that may have something in it.. metals.etc..
I knew I was going to have corals, etc.. And ALOT of $$ in my tank.. So I found a guy with some old tanks, got his sand.. Really cleaned it. Used it as a base, And bought me 15 Pounds of Livesand for the top.. Added Live Rock,Some Raw Shrimp to cycle mine..

What size tank do you have, and what are you going to have in it..??
JMHO The way pollution is, even tho I have seen how beautiful your sand and water is..
It's what you can't see in the sand... Are you going to spend hundreds , or more inside your tank, and never be sure about the sand..?? Till something leaches out..

I know I'm no help.. But I think it can be done, just depends on how brave you are.. LOL

Good Luck, Larry

 

Thanks shipbear, that was actually very helpful. Obviously filling a few buckets of live sand from the gulf would be much cheaper than buying argonite from the LFS, but that is not the main reason for my question. The big idea was to ad some diversity to the bacteria colonies, and all the extra little crawlies and such.

Right now I'm setting up a 55 gal tall-ish octagonal tank. I plan on using a semi deep sand bed, 3 or 4 inches, and mucho live rock. The end goal is to learn the art of reef keeping (corals, inverts, and the whole shibang, before moving on to a much larger tank

 

i set up my 10 gallon with sand from the beach no problems with it but i want to change it because it looks ugly

i'm setting up a 45 gallon and i'm going to be useing the beach sand for my fuge

 

I live in Sarasota and the first tank I set up I used sand from Siesta beach. It was ok for awile but the sand is almost 100% silica and started to cause algae outbreaks when it started to dissolve. The other thing is you mentioned diversity. You dont want any of the organisms that live right on the beach. I cleaned the sand with hot water and then baked it to make sure everything was dead. Coral doesnt come from the beach and neither does the sand the coral lives in. If you were to collect sand from the same area that the coral's grow I think that would be much better.