Aquarium Advice - Gravel or Sand? by Pondguru

Hello again, I'm making this video in response to probably one of the most common questions I get asked in the shop here which is whether to have gravel or sand. All these tanks behind me have under gravel filters which means that through necessity they all have gravel in the bottom as sand would just get sucked straight through the holes and it would you basically can't have like kind of like an under-sand filter being nightmare. Gravel does, however, present a few problems. In that, generally, you can't have little Corydoras, little catfish, in heavy gravel tanks because they find it difficult to feed. They have little barbules around their mouths that they use to hunt out food. If they're digging on in gravel, they tend to wear these little barbules away and damage their mouths. Here's an example of one feeding on sand so you can see how they should be feeding. Also, you may notice in our tanks with the sand in, The sand always looks a lot cleaner than the gravel, even though once a week we'll go in with a gravel cleaner, stir up all the gravel, remove all the organic muck, most of the gravel still has algae on it, and it just never looks as clean as the sand bottom tanks. When you have Corydoras, loaches, even mollusks such as clams moving through the sand, they keep it turned over. That prevents bacterial buildup from uneaten food and so on. and it also helps prevent algae growing if i was doing these tanks behind me again and indeed down the other side of the shop as well with the under gravel filters i would not use under gravel filters although they do support a large capacity of fish the tanks never look as clean unless we've got shrimps in so is there any hard and fast rule for gravel and sand not really some people have tropical tanks full of gravel other people have cold water tanks with sand I tend to recommend sand for tropicals because of the fact you can get your corries and other creatures in that are going to sift through the sand and it does stay a lot cleaner. Plants always seem to do better in sand as well for whatever reason, especially the grassy ones. Sand is actually very important for keeping the pH stable as well. We have found in a lot of these tanks Because with the gravel, we find it hard to get the pH down below 7. It's because a lot of the gravel has a buffering effect, which keeps the pH high. Even when we use peat balls, all the cones, black water extract, all that sort of stuff, we can't seem to get a stable pH in a gravel bottom tank. Whereas all the ones with sand, we literally just drop the peat ball in, forget about it, sets a pH at 6.5. Therefore, we've got most of the sensitive species, including all the South American stuff, killies, corries, discus, angels, tetras, all that sort of thing. In the middle tanks, because we find it a lot easier to keep the water sweet for them. You may well be thinking it's more difficult to clean sand because you can't push a gravel cleaner in and stir it up because obviously you'll suck the sand out. So what we do, we tend to just clean them once a week, same as we do with all the rest of the tanks. We get in, we stir the sand up manually. That releases a lot of the organic stuff that the corries and so on have missed. That goes into suspension, settles on top of the sand, and then we get in with the gravel cleaner. hover just above the sand with the gravel cleaner and that sucks all the organic muck off the top of the sand so really it's pretty easy sometimes go a little bit low we do lose a little bit of sand but it's negligible so in summary for tropicals i would always go sand and for cold water i would tend to go gravel but have an under gravel filter because goldfish and so on So on tend to be messy eaters, you want as much filtration as possible. So by having an under gravel filter it pulls all of that muck into the gravel and keeps it there which means you're always going to have clear water even when you've got big mucky goldfish.