- Today, BRS Sand Buyers Guide,
meaning we're going to find out the right answer
for a lot of people.
One of these things, you probably raise your hands,
say, oh, that's me.
I'm looking for the cheapest option.
I'm looking for the most popular option.
I'm looking for the right grain size, colors.
Maybe the one that cycles the best.
We're gonna find out the answers to all of those.
Because I guarantee you probably spiked up
and said, oh, that's me. I'm one of those things.
All right, as always,
we start off with the number one seller,
because it's actually helpful to know what everybody else,
all of your peers, are picking up the most
and it's hands down, landslide winner, one option.
- Yeah. It's this Special Grade Arag-Alive sand
from CaribSea.
It's a, grain size is maybe one of the most
determining factors here because it's not this really fine,
oolite sand that can blow around all over the place.
It's also not this crushed coral,
giant bits that stay in place, but look a little awkward.
But, you know, in the end,
this stuff is by far the most popular,
both dry and wet bags, but Arag-Alive, the wet one,
that's the one to go.
- There is a, like, inverse relationship
with some desirable components here.
The smaller the grain size,
the more it looks like that beautiful,
like Bahamas beach that you've been to,
but it blows all over the place
in a high flowing aquarium, and so that's not ideal.
It creates big dunes in a tank all over the place,
and bare spots buried and everything.
The other thing is, is the larger the grain size gets,
the more it stays in place, but the less pretty it looks.
- Yep.
- This seems to be like right in the middle of that
and why it's the most popular.
So, this is probably the 80-20 of all the sand,
meaning like 80 percent of the people
probably picking this one up.
That's probably enough for a lot of you too,
it's probably for me.
I also, spoiler alert, there are two favorites
from Randy and I, we'll share those right up front.
- Mine is, I'm going with the crowd on this,
Special Grade Arag-Alive.
That is, it's been what I used for tanks that I put sand in.
It's what I recommend,
you know, holds up to a flow enough for me where I'm not,
I usually have sticks and SPS and stuff,
so it holds up to that flow for me.
And, just follow the crowd, it works.
- I would be the same case. I mean, SPS tank.
But for every other tank,
I actually got a different choice, right.
So I actually have a different need now
with every other tank, which is, I want it to look nice.
I don't really care about blowing around
because I don't have the flow.
If I had really high flow to the blow sand around,
it'd probably kill the affiliates.
So in, like a LPS tank,
I'm actually going with the Ocean Direct Original Grade.
They make a oolite that's a little too fine for me
in most cases, but they have the Original Grade here.
One of the differences here
is that it's a smaller grain size,
and so it looks more like that duney look,
it really, really looks nice.
But, also, all the rest of the stuff is actually sifted out,
dried, and sifted out to very specific particles sizes.
And then they add some water and some bacteria back to it.
With the Ocean's Direct,
it actually takes it right out of the ocean,
they keep it moist in the bag,
it has the bacteria out of the ocean.
You're not paying for any water weight in it.
It has a breathable bag
to allow some gas exchange through the plastic.
And these are the reasons why it's in my own tank.
The 360 at home, is I wanted to add that, you know,
biome that comes with the sand, out of the ocean.
And I also wanted that more natural duney type look
that comes with that finer grain of sand.
And flow really isn't going to interfere with that
in this case.
So, SPS here for almost every other tank,
Oceans Direct Original Grade.
All right, so there are some big priorities.
One of these you'll say this is me.
We're gonna go through them real quick
because it's pretty simple.
- Yeah .
- Starting with, this one is probably for everybody.
- Yeah, I think, like we said, if you 80-20 it,
80 percent of you are going to choose this one.
And there's other priorities
that we're just going to get to in just a second.
But this one's for everyone.
It's for me, it's for a lot of people,
that makes it an easy choice.
- I mean, we're a broken record here.
If you just want to be happy you're probably there.
But if you have a super-duper high flow tank.
- Yeah.
- It's probably this, plus one.
- Yeah.
You could do this Special Grade,
but you know, some people really crank up the flow.
In which case you don't want a bunch of moving down.
Crushed coral, bigger particle size,
much bigger particle size,
would probably be the right choice.
- Yeah. So you can do two ways, right?
One is go all crushed coral.
It's going to collect a lot of detritus
and probably needs to be cleaned.
You probably shouldn't get more than like an inch of it,
but it will stay put, way, way better
than any of the other things that are up on the table here.
And you can mix them.
Now, I would note that they separate over time,
meaning that you will find areas
that will be all crushed coral.
And then to the sides of it
will be the smaller grains of sand.
But if you really want to keep the bottom covered
and not create empty spaces,
you can mix them and put some crushed coral
in specific places.
So super high flow with that,
but what's the best looking sand of all of them, bar none?
- Hands down, Bahamas Oolite.
This is really fine sand.
I mean, when you picture a beach that you're walking on
or swimming in and all that nice, fine sand,
it's the Bahamas Oolite.
And I think one of the best examples of this that I've seen,
was a WWC's lagoon type tank, or their short tank,
250 gallons, what have you, in the old building.
It had that sand in there and they had to be meticulous
about cleaning it.
But gosh, was it gorgeous.
- Yeah. I will say again that we're like duney look
where, you know, the flow just kind of creates
little crests and stuff inside of the sand.
It's really fine.
And it just looks really neat instead of like, you know,
mounds of pebbles per se.
So yeah, no question the Oolite
but I will tell you very, very few people
use the Oolite just cause it blows around so easily.
So, keep that in mind. For me, you know,
the Original Grade here being like,
kind of right in between that,
you end up kind of with a little bit of mix
of all this stuff, because it wasn't sifted.
And then of course, if the biggest priority for you is,
you know, having an easier entry point into the tank,
and especially if you're using dry rock,
and having a natural biome.
Which one?
- If biological diversity's your priority,
Ocean's Direct.
I mean, it's hard to say that that's not the way to go,
because it's come from the ocean.
It's not sifted, it's not dried, it's not added water,
it's not added bacteria, it's what is natural in the ocean.
- This is one of those things
where we're kind of shifting back and forth from priorities
from like, you know, the most natural tanks
to the most sterile tanks.
And this is one of those solutions to find the middle.
Like, a lot of my dry rock will be fairly sterile,
but maybe my sand isn't,
and it isn't just some water added to the bag
with some bacterial juice added,
like, it's actual natural biome coming out of the ocean.
So, you know, this is a good option for those
looking to expand that biome.
So those are the primary considerations,
but there are some tips here on actually how to do this
even better, or things that you might've overlooked as well.
- Yeah, first one is dry is both cheaper,
but also more dusty.
So you can get a 40 pound bag of dry, that's not water.
You don't need to, you're not paying for water weight
and it doesn't have the bacteria and stuff,
but there is one caveat, it's super dusty,
and you should rinse it before using it.
- Yeah, absolutely.
So, it is a way to save a lot of money
just because you're not paying for water weight,
and it's just cheaper in general.
So, dry sand, often a good option,
if you're really trying to get
the lowest cost option out there.
I got another tip, Fiji Pink isn't pink.
So this right here is actually a Fiji Pink here.
And as I see it, I can see one little bit there.
And one little bit there.
All they've done is added some, like, rose quartz to it.
And if you look super, super careful,
you would actually see one, and it sounds really cool,
Fiji Pink, but you won't actually see the pink.
So don't buy it for that purpose.
If there's some other reason
that you're considering Fiji pink, go after that.
But actually,
the Special Grade is just a little bit larger than that.
And you'll never see the little pink bits anyway.
So, that's why we suggest the Special Grade over Fiji Pink,
almost every time.
All right, there's another color sand,
it might sound like a good idea, but I'd skip it
- Yeah, so Black Sand.
You hear us talk about this one,
and some of the reasons why you wouldn't,
unless you really, really, really desire black sand.
Probably the number one reason that we won't recommend it,
is its magnetic properties.
So, you know, the number one way to clean our glass
is a magnet scraper,
and if you have rock that's magnetic,
you just turned your algae cleaner
into a piece of sandpaper.
- There is no doubt that it creates some contrast,
especially with really colorful corals.
- Oh yeah, it's cool.
- It looks cool.
But for me, that number one reason,
that it has some magnetic bits in it
that can stick to your cleaner
and scratch your glass that's off the table for me.
If you don't use a magnetic scraper, probably no big deal.
A couple of other things
is if you use the larger grain version of the black sand,
it will not blow around,
which means they'll just get covered in coralline
and turn purple.
So you're gonna have to decide
whether you want purple or black rock.
And the other one is actually, like a theoretical thing
that I think there's actually some legitimacy too,
which is black doesn't provide any up-dwelling light,
or upwelling light rather.
- Yeah, so I mean, you think about your white sand bed
and you know, white bounces light back,
and black absorbs light.
So if you think about what difference does that make
in getting light to some of the under parts
of your rock work, under parts of the corals,
there might be some light changes at play here,
but black doesn't have that property.
- I got to tell you, anecdotally, I am my own tanker,
I had just a black like ABS bottom.
When I put the sand in,
you could immediately see tons of the shadows
just disappear.
All of that reflection coming off of that white,
bright white bottom, like change the way
that light distributes throughout the tank.
So I think there's actually some truth to that.
This is probably specific to, you know,
SPS tanks, I think, where lighting the bottom of them
is gonna help make sure there's healthy bases,
you know, growing on the rock.
But yeah,
that is absolutely when I don't think
I would do black rock, or black sand rather,
in almost every case.
All right, so one of these probably spoke to you,
you said this one's for me, but how much do you need?
- Yeah, so most popular is going to be a one inch sand bed.
One inch is kind of that balance between, you know,
if it moves around,
I still have some coverage on the bottom,
so I'm not seeing empty spots.
But also maintenance. When it comes to vacuuming the stuff
and, you know, cleaning it out. I can get to it easier,
I can turn over the whole sand bed
while I'm vacuuming much easier.
So one inch, maybe 1.5, I'm at one.
- Yeah, and you really don't want that much deeper
than one inch in most cases,
because it will just collect
a lot of organics and garbage in the tank.
You can often see through it and see all the black streaks
and stuff that go through it.
And then when you disturb it,
that rotten egg smell that comes out of it.
So, you know, deep sand is probably not the best bet
in most cases.
So one inch, a lot of the sands actually have
common tank sizes on the BRS website.
So you can see common tank sizes
and what would achieve one inches of sand for you.
So you can actually see all of that here on the BRS website.
You can see all of the recommendations for how much to use,
what other customers are thinking.
You know, so check out the BRS site,
you can see all the sands that we're talking about
and hopefully, get the right one for you.