sand or bare bottom?

[BioCube14]

I noticed many reefers are going barebottom on their tanks what are the pos and neg on doing this? thanking about doing this on my 34 gal

[JLiu]

Positive you can crank that flow up super high and not have to worry about stiring up the sand.

[aquasport24]

Negatives--dont drop anything heavy (like live rock), it takes awhile for it to looks natural.
Positives--tanks looks alot cleaner, easy to vaccum out debris.

[JeffCo]

Positives:
Can have very high flow and don't have to worry about a sandstorm
Easy to clean, just siphon off the bottom.
keeps low nutirents which is good for SPS tanks.
polyps/mushrooms/and other LPS grow very nicely on the bottom
Use HDPE on the bottom and you don't have a problem if you drop something. I used black HDPE and everything blends in.

Negatives:
You have to keep up on the water changes and siphoning off the bottom. (But really you should do this with any tank)
I like the look of barebottom, but sand does look more natural.
Some wrasses really need sand on the bottom so also think about fish selection.

That's about it, I have a barebottom tank and I'm still glad I went this way with my tank.

[aquasport24]

hey Jeff, with all that big and colorful colonies sps and i cant even tell if you have mud for the bottom..

[BioCube14]

is the bare bottom thing more towards SPS (High flow rate in tank) or for lps and softies as well with medium flow

[moneytank]

for my sps tank its bare bottom, for my fish only tank it has sand...mainly for fish to dig in.

Def. use HDPE (starboard) on bottom for protection from falling rock. The bare bottom makes cleaning real easy. basically when you see stuff sitting on the bottom you vacume it up. once the tank is full of coral you never even notice the bottom if it has sand or not.
one thing i did different on my second bare bottom tank was silicone around the edge. Not required but on my old tank stuff would settle around the edge, making it hard to vacume out.

[SoLiD]

IMHO sand is a much better look. Most people showing off there tanks to non-reefers will have to explain every time why there isn't any sand in the tank. It just looks much more natural. -David

[MissT]

Julian Sprung makes a really good argument in "The Reef Aquarium vol.3" about loss of "upwelling" light in a barebottom system. It is certainly easy to clean, but I've heard of people going from sandbed to bare bottom and having issues with their corals bleaching and dying on the undersides shortly after the transition.
Sprung also mentions loss of same upwelling light when using black sandbeds... IMO, that's certainly something to take into account.

[ErikH]

If someone has some spare white sand, a couple of 20gs, some HDPE, a 250w mh and a PAR tester (luxmeter?, cant remember) we could do an unofficial test.

[Ping]

I am a fan of 1/2 inch sugar fine sand in the display. This is for light reflection, biodiversity, natural look, and some detritus processing.