Sand or no sand that is the question?

What do you prefer for a fuge? Sand or no sand and for what reasons.

Thanks in advance

 

IMO the more natural filters you have the better SAND ALL THE WAY!!!

if you fear that sand will "take away" some of the macros food i can tell you i use to have an old 50 gallon set up with a refu/sump with inversed light cycle for the macros and the things grew like crazy regardless of my live sand bed being present in the refu/sump.

 

I have some extra sand that I can bleach and clean up and put a couple of inches in there with my Cheato I guess..... Anyone else?

 

Nitrate sink?

Unless you are going with a lot of sand for a deep sand bed or have some purpose for it such as caleurpa roots, I'd probably skip it. It will collect detritus and break it down and provide some filtration, but after a while it can release those back into the system. Better to be able to just remove the detritus. That's my $.02...

 

That is kind of the reason that I didnt put any sand in there to begin with. I made a mistake of putting a bunch of rubble in there so I might take that out and put some LR in there so I can clean out the detritus during WCs

 

I went with no sandbed in my refugium and also rock rubble. I also bought some bird netting from lowes (~$7) and did about 3 bundles of rubble and threaded the netting closed with zip ties. Now I can lift the rubble out to siphon out detritus. Works great!!

 

That is a SWEET idea!! Thats going on my list of must dos this weekend.