The Puffer Forum

I had it set up and running since Sunday (today is Thursday) It has a AC70 filter and play sand as the substrate, also I have a few pieces of fossilized coral. I bleached the coral and then chlorinated it. So is the foam good bad or does it mean nothing?

Thanks,
Trever

Remind us again--is this FW, BW or SW?

right now its in FW but soon i am going to put salt in to make it BW

Have you done any tests on the water lately?

I dont have a kit yet

I have play sand in one of my tanks. If you don't rinse that sand extremely well it will make foam. Where did you get it from? I gave some from Home Depot and Lowes. We gave up on the sand from Lowes, it's too hard to clean. The Home Depot sand cleaned up real nice.

I got it from lowes. But mine cleaned up pretty well I thought

We rinsed ours about 15-20 times in a 5 gallon bucket about half full...we did several buckets for our 55g this way. Is your water cloudy? If it is you may want to let it settle for a day before you run your filter to lesson the risk of sand particles getting in your filter. We did it with a hose outside with straight tap water. After we filled the tank with declorinated water I stirred the sand up to make sure the declorinated water mixed well with the sand. You may want to stir the sand up well (filter off) and siphon the water out to clear things up a bit. Doing that a few times should get the foam out. Each time you fill it don't forget to use some Prime or other declorinator in the water. This is what we had to do with our Fahaka last weekend. He was in an established tank but after disrupting the sand so much during the moving process the water tank wad really cloudy and foamy once filled. In my 55 gallon you can run your fingers through the sand now and there is no clouding at all. That was with Home Depot sand. You may want to think about adding some Aragonite sand to help keep the tank more stable as well. I have no yet done this in 2 of my tanks but Plan on doing it this weekend during water changes...yay (sarcastic)

Does the water also smell funny?

Pufferpunk wrote:Have you done any tests on the water lately?

Its very important to have a Test Kit. With it you can tell a lot.

^^^what he said!

A lot of sand is heavily contaminated with organics _ which give the foamy look. Most tests will not show much from that. But the rinse water shows it while you are cleaning the sand. Biofilm on the water surface gives the same effect. We do not have protein/oil teats, but it is not good for the aeration of the tank.