Quote:
Originally Posted by liegeofinveracity  hi all, i have been doing a boatload of reading about the deep sand bed concept and have to admit, i don't find myself any wiser than before  anyone here used or using one? if so would you do it again? |
First off you have to consider why you would use one in the system and what are the expected benefit's from it on your part ? And then the last thing is you have to understand that to this day not a single soul has ever been able to explain to me where all the DOC's wind up at in these little glass boxes of saltwater ? At the end of the Carbon chain their is always a sludge.. Not to say some do not get away with running a DSB for a few yrs But its with lots of work and maintenance . Plus the semi to annual replenishing of the wonderful sand fauna.
This is what I was telling them in the mid 90's when this bad idea was trotted back out again.. All I got was ooohhhhh never the sand bugs will totally self regenerate themselves ! LOL then guess what peoples sand started to cap and harden and then first thing was will rake it to keep it from setting up Bad Idea ! then it was add some sand sifters to keep it open and loose LOL Again a Bad Idea the sand sifters are just eating what you do not have enough of already as the sand is setting up. Then it was Oh well you have to replenish the sand fauna every yr then it went to 6 months !
There is a laundry list of things that go wrong and what will cause the problems But at the end of the day I still say sooner or later all septic tanks need to be pumped out .. At least with a Plenum you can achieve that and remove the bio sludge every yr or so as needed when the alga's start to take over the nutrient rich sand
