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I am thinking of seting up a tank with and under gravel jet system. may be a crazy question but can you use sand? will the jets blow around the sand to much and make a mess?

sand will cause problems for you underwater jet system.
additionally from what I recall about the use of sand you will get areas of compaction that will generally not allow for the flow of oxygen this will greate a n anarobic environment that will create problems with Nitrate

The Under Gravel systems normaly end up trapping fish waste too and cause problems. I would get yourself a nice Hang on the back style filter.

55G Planted tank thread
19G Container Pond
[IMG]http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y118/Wingsdlc/Ric

Hi,
If you are talking about true sand and a UGF then the
answer is "No," the grains will fall between the slats
in the plates and fill the gap between the glass bottom
and the plate.
The sand jets that I've seen are a tube with holes along
its side and capped off at the end. It is placed along
the bottom of the tank and sand is piled as the substrate
above it. Then water is injected into the tube and the
sand is fountained up to fall back and eventually be
fountianed up again. You would have to experiment with
the pump so that the sand fountain is only a couple of
inches high, and the intake must have a sponge prefilter
to keep the really small grains and dust out of the pump.
To make a system that worked, I believe the sand layer
would have to be deep, around 3 inches or more.
Too shallow, and the sand would be blown up into the
water and work its way away from the tube. Eventually
you would then wind up with an exposed tube instead of
the fountians. If it was deep enough then the sand would
fall back in on itself and the tube to be "recycled."

The "Bad" part is that sand that deep tends to compact.
There is little or no water circulation between the grains
and it is easily clogged with the detritus within the tank.
All that leads to areas of black, anaerobic bacteria that
is toxic to fish and plants. The black areas give off a
gas (byproduct of the bacteria) called Hydrogen Sulfide,
that is toxic to the fish and plants.

Frank


-->>> The Confidence of Amateurs, is the Envy of Professionals <<<--

not an underground filter, but an underground jet system. UGJ is using power heads w/ reverse flow going threw pvc pipe w/ 3 to 4 jets on each power head to keep even flow throughout the tank it also keeps the derbies out of the gravel. thanks but i went w/ small pea gravel instead of sand.

i know exactly is being talked about.

i was looking at something similar to this, but what you could do, instead of putting the power heads near the bottom of the tank, put them right at the top, so their pushing water from the top of the tank down onto the bottom. this should work with no problems with the sand, as long as your pumps are to power full and pushing sand up toward the top of the tanks

like this, but as i said, mount it higher up


similar to what was done here
http://www.cichlid-forum.com/articles/ug_jets.php

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