Loaches Online Forum

Okay, improvement project for this weekend will be trade out my Petsmart gravel for some more appropriate sand for my golden dojos, clowns, and angelicus.

Can anyone suggest what type of sand AND easy places to find it? I live in a smaller town, but we do have Petsmart and Home Depot.

Thanks, doglover

Doglover, I recommend swimming pool filter sand. Shop around to find the color and grain size you like.Every store,spa or swimming pool outlet seem to carry different sand.I bought my last lot at the local "MEIYER" store.

Oldfish, I will try that out. Unfortunately, though I live in Arizona, my little mountain town is at 7,000 feet above sea level, with serious winters. So I think there are 5 home swimming pools in the whole area! I'll check for a spa store, though--we may have one of those. If not, perhaps on my next jaunt to Phoenix.

Hoping to hear other ideas as well!

I just added sand 8.50 for 50 pounds pool filter sand at your local swimming pool dealer. I am ECSTATIC .See a few pics at this link of mine I took before my camera croaked. It is much whiter in the tanks than it appears in the bag.Do it,Do it. I have done two tanks now http://s156.photobucket.com/albums/t26/ ... medtinman/

What is the ideal depth of the sand bed for loaches---including dojos?

so much better tinman. it loosks really good. i bet your loaches will love it. you will probably notice them paw at it with their fins. sometimes they scoot along the sand pulling themselves. its really cool looking.

I can not belive my camera died . I will get one and post new pics and a link. I can not stay out of the basement now!!!!! The big loaches were HILARIOUS when they went exploring .I added 2 power heads in two of my tanks(Fluval 4Plus) for an additional 520 gal per hour flow per tank(2000Liters per hour) so they would find new current that would surprise them and run back to the pipe all wound up,then come out and look around and play till they run up in the flow again,then fly home like "what was that?". They had a blast when they figured out how to spray the sand into the flow and just played for fun spraying the sand up. . These are the three in with the bicher on my pics I am refering to here.I am so happy I found You all on this big huge WWW

doglover_50 wrote:What is the ideal depth of the sand bed for loaches---including dojos?

Hi doglover,

I don't have sand in my tank, yet, but I did some searches, and I found this thread where chefkeith states that he never uses more than 1" of sand in his tanks. It's a long thread, but it's in there somewhere. (on page 2)

http://forums.loaches.com/viewtopic.php?t=6488&start=0

Maybe others will come along with other suggestions, too.

It will depend on if you want live plants or not as well. If you want plants you will likely want up to a few inches in places. My tank has about 1" or so at the front sloping up to the back that's several inches deep.

btw great to see tinman so psyched about the benefits of sand now

Well me and icewall used Commercial Grade Quickrete - Fine Sand in our tank. The sand grains were pretty uniform and the loaches seemed to love it. It took a while to clean all the sand before we put it in (to get all the dust out) but its looks nice and the loaches seemed to love it. We got it from home depot for like 5 bucks per 25ibs.

I used 3M colorquartz in mine. It's a manufactured sand. Very round, uniform, and comes in a bunch of colors (I wanted a black substrate). It also comes from pool suppliers and flooring companies.

I am pumped up Spankenstyne ,with this many years keeping fish it is exciting to feel this way again,anything that makes my loaches happy and my chalceus bright red is tops on my list.

Well, I'm flying out of Phoenix this weekend, so no shortage of pool stores down there! Hopefully can find something--black sand would be great!

I'm talking with someone in a pool store in Phoenix who asked this queston--he's trying to locate pool filter sand for me (colored, hopefully):
Can anyone advise me on his question?

"silica based sand? Or regular sand, just colored?"