oops lol i totally forgot about the questions you had ask :/.
I have gravel in there right now, should I switch it to sand?
-doesn't matter which but if you want plants sand isn't the best cause it can't hold down plants, either one should be fine though
I'm planning on having different types of shrimp, what is the over all Ph and temp I should have in the tank?
-a pH that isn't flucuating is good and for temp i would say nothing over 80 and nothing below 65 is probably a good range and same with the pH, a non-changing temp
I would like to breed them, how many of each should I have? (thinking of starting with cherry and ghost, hope they can't mix, can they?)
-cherrys and ghost do not mix, if you get the tiger shrimp or bee shrimps they might mix, check out petshrimp.com. I would say if your ordering online maybe 10 is a good number because then you would have a greater chance of having a few females and males (usualy the people dont tell you online) and also if some of them die there is a less possibibility that all of them die if you have more unless the temp is like super hot that day.
Cherry shrimp and ghost shrimp are both really easy to breed according to my research and some of my experience. Just last time i did a water change i saw a baby ghost shrimp swimming around on a dwarf sag leaf
and i didn't even have to do anything special but i haven't found it since, hope it's still alive. If you are planning on breeding then you should have plenty of places to hide even if you dont have fish in the tank because i hear ghost shrimp are canibals and might eat their own children like livebearers do. Also i wouldn't worry too much about pH and i dont know why there is suddenly some pH worrying problem with everyone lol. Just make sure it is stable. I don't get what you meant on the last paragraph, do you mean you have a tank already set up with guppys and now you want to switch the guppies out with shrimp? if so that will work and should be fine. Oh and if you are breeding them a good filter choice would be a sponge filter if you can't get one and you have a HOB i would get some filter floss pad thing and cover the inlet so none of the baby shrimp get into it. As for the cleaning the tank, if the algae is mostly soft algae like fuzz algae, and brown algae then the shrimp should clean a little of it off also but if its something like green spot algae then i would just clean it cause the shrimp can't eat that. Have you decided what you are gonna feed your shrimp? i've been doing a lot of reasearch on that lately and i have decided to feed the following-
-Hikari Algae wafers
-Hikari Crab Cuisine
-Jake's Veggy food recipe on plantgeek.net in the article section
-spirula flakes
-omega one sinking pellets
some good things to feed that i don't have cause it ran out of money lol-
-vitachem added to jake's veggy food recipe
-cyclopeeze (i hear its really good for shrimp but i already ordered 50 bucks in stuff from drsfostersmith.com and really didnt wanna spend the last $9 but if i didnt buy so much stuff i woulda got that)
-things with calcium and iodine in them (spinach)
Thats just to give you an idea of what to feed and i dont know if you know but shrimp like a varried diet also and just cause its an algae eating shrimp doesn't mean it is only suppose to eat algae and they should have some form of protien and other nice stuff in their diet. (i didn't know this untill before i bought my first shrimp
) so just in case you didn't know...