So, as you may know I have white sand in my tank. I love it but it is clogging the sump filter material to the point that nearly every other day we have to rinse it out. I now have a layer of sand at the bottom of my sump as well. As we all know, the Oscars and the Pleco like to "play" with the sand and gravel. So on a regular basis the Pleco digs craters and there is sand floating everywhere. The Oscars like to swim rapidly along the bottom wiggling about which causes sand to go everywhere.

We were considering either two options:

1. Totally switching back to gravel - removing as much sand as possible.
- however, removing the sand may cause a mess and could mess up my BEAUTIFUL water conditions.

2. Adding a layer of gravel to the existing sand level.
- could this cut down on the floating sand? Keep my water conditions? If I was to clean the gravel would it just end up burying it under the sand eventually?

I'm also considering black gravel to hide the POOP !!

I'll be honest... I'm posting this thread trying to think through all the possibilities and issues that I could run into. Please... help me think of what I haven't thought of? Suggestions welcome as well!

i used to have a mixture of sand and pebbles: initially 1 : 1 ratio.
later, i made it 2 cups pebbles for every cup of sand


and this one is 3:1 sand being 1.... however all substrates are gone now.

You could try to mix sand and gravel.

Or if you want to change over to gravel it is very easy to remove the sand. Just syphon out the sand when you do a water change. If you dont remove all the sand during one water change then just do it over a few water changes