Old Sand

I was wondering..... while i was deployed my wife sold her tank due to it crashing and she kept the sand in a 5 gallon buck with some water. The bucket has a lid on it... is it still alive or is it no good to use?

 

does anyone know?......

 

I'm not an expert, but IMO its base sand now. Give it a couple of rinses and use it.

 

I would use extreem caution with that sand depending on how long it has been sitting it may or maynot be still live but either way it could be holding some very nastie toxins to your established tank rince extreemly well with fw and add it to your tank in very thin layers it will become live again

we hear all to often some one stired up a dsb and caused their tank to crash due to letting the nasties out of it all the anoribic bacteria and toxins it holds

 

I would personally dry it out to kill everything then slowly add it after a bunch of rinces. I also have a few 5 gallon buckets of old live sand from older tanks that I will adventually use in a new fuge.

 

Pour a 1/2 cup of bleach into a 5 gal bucket and fill that 2/3 full of sand rinse well then the use the remainder of the bleach water to wash the sand again then a really good rinse then spread out the wet sand to air dry and re use it there is nothing wrong with it. Have applied this many times and never a issue with me or others who do the samething. Why waste the sand a good aragonite is expensive .

 

thank you all!!

 

I was reading through some pages here and people talk about cooking rock in a oven.

Maybe you can place all the sand in a pyrex or a deep cookie sheet and bake it so it kills everything.

It might also make it nice and white and pretty looking again.

 

sounds like a good idea

 

When you see the reference to cooking rocks they don't mean in a oven.. Its a bleach bath they are talking about . But now that I think about it I seen some really off the wall stuff being touted and repeated . Now if you want to why not just microwave it kind of an autoclave .. ?