What's your favorite substrate?

Do you like gravel? Commercialized substrates? Sand? Bare Bottom?

For my non-planted tanks I either want bare bottom (non-cycled tanks) or regular neutral colored gravel (cycled tanks). For planted tanks I LOVE eco-complete.. but it's SOO expensive.

I really want to try sand, but haven't gotten around to buying it yet. XD
I don't want to go through all the hassle of rinsing it out all crazy like.

When I first started I used all those neon gravel colors, but now I prefer natural colored gravel.

I love the black gravel with flecks of neon that Petsmart's brand has... Petco has something similar, but I've found that this fades a lot less. I've had it with Alistair for six months and it's still a SUPER dark black.

I love black gravel too.. either black or tan. Sexxy Beast has a mix of tan, white, and black that looks ok.

I've got black sand in my sorority. It looks nice when it's clean. xD

I use eco-complete; I don't like inert substrates! They dont grow my plants well

It's actually not too bad if planted tanks are what you have- it's around $20 at petco in black and cost only $6!!! to ship! Most places like amazon will charge you over $20 since its 20lbs of gravel.

I also like both black and natural colored gravel (inert) :B

I love the look of my sandy tanks - only have 2. I bought the orange and blue sands from PetCo, for two different tanks. I had trouble cleaning it without sucking up all the sand before I got my Python knock-off though.

I've always used gravel... it was just readily available and ... what was used. I'm really digging bare-bottomed though. I prefer the look of a tank with substrate, but bare-bottom is easier.

I love the look of natural gravel (which is what I've had) and sand (always wanted to try!) but since I never cycled my tanks, I changed to bare bottom and I'm really starting to like the way it looks. Much easier to clean as well. I have all my gravel waiting for me to be able to use it later.

I've had:
- Barebottom: I put a piece of paper with some river rocks printed on it under the tank, it looks nice XD. Very easy to clean
- Neon/weird coloured gravel: Not really my thing, I think they look better in smaller tanks than big ones.
- Black gravel: I did this with one of my tanks, It looks VERY nice and makes your fishes' colour stand out but unfortunately the optical effects of black make everything look smaller
- White gravel: I love white gravel, it also makes your fish stand out and it has the optical effect of making your tank look bigger, but it gets dirty really easily, I find
- Tan/natural gravel: LOVE IT. Although it makes the bottom look "busy"
- Mixing various colours of gravel: I have white/tan and white/black right now. The white/tan makes it look very big and natural, I really like it!. The white/black looks very contemporary and makes everything in your tank stand out. It's hard to achieve a sense of depth with it though because of the high contrast.
- Thin vs. Thick amounts of gravel: Thin gravel is easy to keep and look clean...especially if the bottom of your tank has an opaque rim to hide all the stuff that falls down the sides, but it looks like it's kind of "just there". Thick gravel looks really nice if you create some depth with different levels of gravel by sloping it around, however if poop falls down the side it's really obvious to see XD

I REALLY WANT TO TRY A THICK LAYER OF SAND <3

I also need to get a proper gravel vac :C

Eco complete or something similar so my plant roots can grow. I always use black. I just like how it looks. But they do come in clay and natural coloring.

I like bare bottom for unfiltered tanks and gravel for filtered ones. I have never tried sand or anything else.