The Puffer Forum

me ethier until I got into fish lol. and ive grown up around pools lol

I've got play sand in a couple of my tanks. I used to loose a proportion of it down the drain when washing it but found a better way to wash it by accident.

If you have it in a bucket or barrel (in my case) and really move it around in a rotary fasion by hand, it becomes shear thinning or suddenly looses all resistance to being shoved around. The thing with this is all of the dust and smaller particles of sand thay would make a tank go cloudy end up in suspension. If you let it sit for a few seconds, all the larger partices sink to the bottom and stay there and all of the 'rubbish' stays in the water which you can pour off.

I've only cleaned sand for set ups about twenty times and never noticed this

thats a good idea! thanks!

sogg how did you do it before?

Thats how i was told to do it, so i dont know any other way lol

Ok, so curious - you speak of pool filter sand... hopefully tomorrow I'll find this at my local store (Do-It-Best Hardware, it's listed online for them at least)...
http://doitbest.com/Swimming+pool+chemi ... dib#online
It's HTH Pool Filter Sand. The bag states "non-toxic" but does that include for aquarium use? I really hope so, and hope the in-store price is close to the price here.

Just curious - I might do a full change (gravel to sand) tomorrow, as well as set up my official snail breeder All before work!

I think it would be fine, my playsand said the same thing

I've never had any bad side effects from my play-sand and I've used a couple of different brands.

hhmmm

I found a place that sold 2 different kinds of play sand today - one regular, and the other white. I almost bought the white sand, but it said, "Cleaned White Play Sand." and in the bottom right, in the corner it said, "Not for use in aquariums." Must be because of a what they used to clean it I imagine... but scary, had I not seen that, I'd have bought it!