Moving Tank Questions

[engwife36]

I will be moving my Oceanic RR 110 in 2 weeks. I will only be driving 10 miles at the most to my new house. The tank is an established reef with about a 3 inch sand bed and about 150lbs of LR. My question is, what is the best way to break down the tank? Should I keep the same water? Use a bunch of 5 gallon buckets? etc, etc, etc.......

[caferacermike]

I've always tossed out the old water. My feelings are that old water is just that, old dirty water. You will stir up so many contaminants that it would be pointless to put dirty water back in, even if you suction it out as clean as possible before disturbing anything.

Believe this or not but I've had really good luck helping people move with this othre trick I once saw. Put about 3 gallons of sand to the side in a bucket. Then take the rest of the sand and wash it out with tap water. Rinse until clean. This helps prevent fouling the tank with all that buried detritus. Spread the clean sand first and cover it with a thin layer of of the saved substrate to quickly reseed it. Your live rock should have plenty of microfauna to help establish the tank.

This may or may not be sound advice but I've used it to move 4 tanks over 100g that were fully established and each time there was barely a hiccup once set up.

[SACoastie]

I reciently moved my 75 gallon that was going for about 1 year as a reef. I siphoned half of the tank into 3 different 30 gallon clean trash cans. Make sure to use heavy duty plastic trash cans for this. ( Local LFS would most likely let you borrow theirs for a few hours. ) Then transferred all of my corals, fish, ect. into them and continued draining the water. I kept the sand in the tank with about an inch of water on it. Next I covered the cans with clean trash bags and saran wrap and tape over the tank. Loaded everything up, drove about 8 miles to my next house. Set everything back up and poured the water slowly over a large dinner plate placed inside the tank as to not stir up to much of the sand. Total process took about 2 1/2 hours. I did not loose anything. I used the very same water and did a 20% water change two days later. This worked excellently for me and I hope the same for you. :D

[blueboy]

i don't think that would be possible with a 110 with a 3" sand bed. my brother and i moved my 120 with about an inch of sand and water in it, i think it almost killed him! seriously, it was VERY heavy. next time i moved it we took the sand out, much lighter!

[engwife36]

Ya, that Oceanic tank was extremely heavy empty.

[caferacermike]

Whoa I'd never move a tank with the sand in it. I'd fear the bottom would crack or twist. Way to sketchy for me.