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sand is pretty expensive nowadays. Does look good but... definatly over priced. so i was just wondering can any sand be used?
Well there is a big pile of sand in the woods near my house. So do you think I could get a bucket of that and give it a good good clean? im trying to save as much money as possible at the min haha.back in 2004 i went to a place that recieved hardly any human traffic (cars, feet, whatever) so i thought it could be a least polluted as possible. Collected a bunch of pretty fine dirt. Took it home, sifted it to get the finer stuff that basically became sand. Plants loved it because of its natural nutrients i think. Heres an old pic
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And Now I have a 46 that I've been cycling for the past month, and I have sand that i collected from the sand dunes in it. I think it is really rich in iron, as a magnet will pickup grains of sand. But when I didnt have any plants in it, brown algae broke out pretty quick-like and was mostly just growing on the sand.
...so dont know if that was useful at all
Why do you need to cook the sand?yea why not, just rinse it as long as you can bear it to make sure its clean of everything, and as least cloudy as you can make it.
Then I cooked it in a frying pan on a bbq burner. I didnt actually cook the sand for this 46 gallon (which may or maynot haunt me later on) but i am adding more sand to build the aquascape up more, but i got a large tin foil that you cook a turkey in. and am going to be baking it in that.
I collect substrate because i dont want to pay for it either haha.