Keeping aquarium substrate clean is very much important for the healthy livings of aquatic fishes. If you use sand as substrate of your tank, then it’s a bit difficult to keep it clean. Sand is lighter in weight and easily makes the water dirty in slight jerking. Despite all the difficulties, aquarists must keep the substrate clean for the healthy growth of the species.

Required Materials:
Gravel siphon is very much effective tool to perform substrate cleaning. Gravel works fantastic at sand substrate. There are different types of gravel siphon available in the market. Commonly found gravel siphon in the market are too long. In long gravel siphon, there is small diameter hose and a clear cylinder is attached to it. Using clear cylinder will provide higher suction which is not expected in lighter sand substrate. In that case, you may go for wider cylinder because wider cylinder provides less suction.

Process of Cleaning Aquarium Sand:

    1.   Waste which can be remove by hands should be done first.

    2.   Remove hard scaping materials, rocks and other décor items.

    3.   Place your siphon and use a waste bin at the outer unit of siphon.

    4.   Keep your siphon’s wider end to the substrate and allow it to suck waste from the sand. Sometimes sand will tend to pass through siphon and that time pull the siphon up. Thus, sand will fall back to the substrate. Continue this process until your whole substrate gets clean.

Keeping Substrate Dwellers or Sand Pickers:

There are lots of species which are substrate dwellers and take their food from the substrate. Shrimp, loaches, dwarf anchor catfish, synodontis lucipinnis and geophagus are known for bottom dwellers. Only keeping bottom dwellers is not enough to keep clean substrate. Additionally, you have to keep continue your routine sand cleaning actions.

Few More Tips:

Yes, keeping healthy sand substrate is one of the toilsome tasks in the aquarium hobby. But there are no other alternatives other than doing this. You cannot let your substrate go as its own. Here are few tips to maintain healthy sand substrate for your fish:

    1.   Keep your substrate less deep preferably 1 inch.

    2.   There are substrate dwellers fish which will keep your substrate healthy by moving around the substrate and eating debris and other waste.

    3.   Keep cleaning habit at regular interval.

    4.   Keep strong monitoring on significant changes over substrate color. But remember a little red, green even brown color express the presence of good ecosystems.

Don’t let your substrate to get compact. If your substrate remains untouched for long time it will get compacted. Thus, sand will not be able to get in touch with water and oxygen.