Embarrased to admit, but substrate revamp...help please?!?

OK when I started this round i went to one of my best friends that owned a LFS and yes walked out with a bag of "live sand" and crushed coral. Well I've been in denial about the bad kid in the neighborhood and didn't want to deal with switching it out. But before it turns into a nightmare, i decided to do just that. I ordered 40 pounds of coarse aragonite from marco and some more base dry rock.

Here's my plan, scoop 1/3of the CC out at a time, and use a PVC pipe to funnel the new sand bed in and let it that set for a week or so so it seeds proper before doing more!

Any thoughts? Besides the obvious CC jabs? lol TIA

 

thinking of using a little kitty litter scooper for the task??

 

Drain the water out into a holding tank, shopvac the CC pump back in the water back in? Although you are pretty stocked i think i recall, how much rock and fish do you have?

 

I usually use something like a SOLO cup to scoop that kind of stuff out. Using the PVC pipe sounds like a good idea as well.

 

+1 on the PVC pipe idea.

 

Yeah thats not gonna work, have a YT, mandarin, dotty back, 2 occ.'s,a chromes and my new wrasse, plus 40 some pounds of LR, thinking the stick smith idea is more feasible and too many corals to deal with that. Plus the huge cuc i'd devastate.

 

Might want to sift each scoop of CC and save any CUC you can. Can make a screen real quick with some window screen and a couple chunks of 2x4. Not sure it's worth the effort though...

 

An even easier method is to just use a fish net honestly.

 

yeah it is, thats half the reason i wanna go slow, i spent a ton of cash getting this tank seeded and a good cuc so i'll take some more time saving all the little critters i can. Although I think someone is playing snails Al Green lately, eggs everywhere!

 

I like that idea, it'll catch some of the "crap" and nasties and then i can sort through that to save the good guys.