Bathing Sand Recommendation

[skittish]

Hi everyone,

Apologies if this has been covered before, but I am looking for bathing sand recommendations.

By way of a little backstory, a few years ago I bought about 70-80kg of Tiny Friends Farm sand (they were on an astounding price offer that I have never seen matched since and honestly, knowing what I know now I wish I'd got twice as much!) and we're almost at the end of our supply. We recently reordered some more but they seem to have changed the composition (or we got a bad batch?) and the sand was much, much coarser and grittier than our old (current) sand.

We are really disappointed because we loved how this sand worked for our degus fur - their fur is so smooth and soft it's like silk. In fact when we got our new girls recently, we thought they looked a little dishevelled and when we gradually switched them from their old sand over to the Tiny Friends Farm sand their fur was much improved, which confirmed our opinion of it.

We're not sure whether this new composition will provide the same results so we're currently on the hunt for a potential replacement if it doesn't work out.

I'd love to hear any recommendations for sand you use for your own degus or recommendations of any to steer clear of. I am buying one of each type/brand I can find so I have a good range to compare and I'd also be interested if there is anything out there I haven't come across in my search.

Thanks in advance

[bouncy]

I bought a large sack from Hansemann that I'm still working through. I ordered it whilst I was in Austria, though, so shipping was free.

[skittish]

Aug 6, 2021 22:37:42 GMT bouncy said:

I bought a large sack from Hansemann that I'm still working through. I ordered it whilst I was in Austria, though, so shipping was free.

Thank you Bouncy, we buy our forage from Hansemann but hadn't even thought about them for sand! To some extent we will spend whatever we need to in order to get a product we are happy with for them so I'll have a look and see what they can do.

[moletteuk]

I don't have any specific recommendation but some are definitely based on plain sand and some are more of a clay dust, so to find what you are looking for you may need to mix a couple together. It's worth reading any small print to see what the sand is made of, especially for the clay dust based ones.

And just a note that most of us seive and reuse the sand, you can bake it in the oven to sterilise too if you think necessary. I probably got through less than 10% of your 80kg over the lifetime of my degus!

[bouncy]

Ditto molette. I give it a sieve every couple of weeks. Fully replacing the sand annoys my lot, so I just sift out the poos, recycle the treats Silly has buried, and just top up as needed.