# Washing Old Sand, Switch Over To Smaller Breeder Tank



## Sylar_92 (Dec 15, 2010)

Hey guys, I was transfering sand over to my 20 gal convict breeder tank from my red tanks and notice while I washing the sand a air bubble came to the surface of the water and popped! The smell that came out of it stank to high hell. I almost barfed from the stench, should I just buy new sand or is there a way to get rid of the smell? like if I bought active carbon and just mixed it into my sand, will that work? the carbon floats so I guess I can vac it out later. Tell me what you guys think, all feed back is appreciated.









- SYLAR


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## MPG (Mar 14, 2010)

Probably just gas trapped in the sand. Have you been stirring up your sand regularly? You should do it every 2 weeks imo.


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## Sylar_92 (Dec 15, 2010)

MPG said:


> Probably just gas trapped in the sand. Have you been stirring up your sand regularly? You should do it every 2 weeks imo.


Yeah, I stir the sand up every week when I vac the waste. do you think adding carbon into the sand will get rid of the smell? I been washing it for a few hours and the stench is still lingering from the first time I took the sand out.


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## 65galhex (Nov 5, 2008)

Not to highjack your thread Sylar but I thought mixing up sand stirs up ammo and other harful crap?


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## Sylar_92 (Dec 15, 2010)

65galhex said:


> Not to highjack your thread Sylar but I thought mixing up sand stirs up ammo and other harful crap?


Iam running canister filters in the tank so I I think the filters should be sufficient enough to handle all the waste. I also use seachem prime every time I ad water after I do a vac, which is suspose to remove the ammo and nitrates. Strange thing is the seachem prime is starting to smell really strongly like black mushrooms, is that normal?


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## Guest (Apr 20, 2011)

Trapped gasses, one of the reasons sand can be annoying. I just poke a stick into the sand bed every 3 weeks and mix it up a bit (tank is heavily planted so I rarely have to do maintenance on substrate).


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## TheSpaz13 (Apr 9, 2010)

x3 on trapped gasses. Even if you do stir the sand regularly its not going to compare to the agitation you get from removing it all together. I wouldnt be worried about it at all if I were you


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## sick of chiclids (May 25, 2010)

a vac just agitatates the surface of the sand. are you actualy stiring it up? if not you've got anerobic bacteria in your sand. if that gets into your tank, that can be very bad news for your fish.


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## Piranha-Freak101 (Dec 8, 2010)

Hollysh!t this scares me because at the bottom of my mac tank there are what appears to be air bubbles


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## Johnny_Zanni (Nov 8, 2009)

Prime should smell like sulphur.


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## the_w8 (Jul 28, 2003)

MY PRIME smells like a beer fart


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## Sylar_92 (Dec 15, 2010)

Johnny_Zanni said:


> Prime should smell like sulphur.


Oh...The bottle is really starting to smell bad and the radius of the smell is far enough up to the point where my brother can smell it across the living room which is 30' from the doorway to the back wall window. The prime is still clear but I dripped some on a plate the other day and left beside my lizards heat lamp for a week and it created a small colony mound. Which makes me think that there might be some fungus action going on in the bottle.


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