is it to late to swith to sand?

when i first started my aquarium i jumped into it not knowing much about what i was doing and i used crushed coral for substrate and now im wanting to swith to live sand how do i need to go about doing this or is it just a bad idea. i have had my aquarium for a little over a year and i want to start keeping some coral

 

not too late. i did the same thing, and scooped out all of my crushed coral and replaced it with nice sand. this helped alot with my algae problems.

one important thing - when clearing out your old bed, you've got to do it in small sections because you're going to stir up a "cycle" as you disturb the deep anoxic/hypoxic layer of substrate.

when i did this with my 75 gal it took about 3 weeks to get the old substrate out.

good luck!

 

theres nothing wrong with crushed coral
most people just don't like how it looks

you can change though i did the same thing
i had coral and live stock in my tank at the time so i drained the water into buckets and put the live stock in the buckets.
i then scooped out the cc and added dead sand to avoid a cycle.
i then added everything back in.
over the next couple days its a good idea to check for ammonia but i didn't get any
gl if you do do this.

 

do i want to take out the fish before adding the sand?

 

also what will i look for when buying the new sand?

 

cc does collect and trap detritus quite a bit more than sand. sand beds are better managed by a good clean up crew than a cc bed. for my tank, changing out the bed arrested a big algae problem

as long as you go slow, probably should be ok. how big is the tank, how deep is the substrate, and what type of fish?

 

it is a 12g tank about 2" of cc and i have 2 clowns for fish also a turbo snail and at least one hermet crab

 

go nano! should be ok. i'd do it in parts as i said, and do a water change soon after each removal to minimize the shock/cycle issue.

 

sounds great i will just do a little swith out once a week with my water change you guys and gals are the best thanks for all the help i need all i can get

 

i did that in my 55. had crushed coral then did research on the problems. i scooped it out and put in sand. it does make your water look horrible for a day just run a powerfilter with a new pad. i did this before i had corals though i dont know how they would react to this my fish just hid for a while.