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Moving Advice

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cafebritt

Hi everyone,
I need some advice. I'm planning to move at the end of July. I have a 72 Gallon bow front tank. How should I handle the move. What should I do with the live rock and the sand. How about the fish. ??? Is there any companies that will break down and setup the tank. Thanks ;D
 
C

Candi

In order to give the best advice we need to know details of your move.... are you moving close or far, driving/flying/etc.

I moved from MI to NJ in December... we drove straight through (12+ hours) in my attempt to get everything here alive. I made some mistakes, lost some fish & corals (avoidable I now know what I did wrong) and learned alot.

Give us some more details and we'll go from there :)

Basically, a tank move keeping your livestock is doable... but it's going to take a lot more time then you could ever imagine to do it right LOL and you've got to cover all bases since sometimes its the little things that will get you (ask poor Carlo about his heater incident after his move went pretty well :( )

Candi
 
E

ebqwert

Thanks for the plug everyone.

I got his PM and I'll try to talk with him tomorrow.

CafeBritt: are you coming to the meeting on Saturday?

Eric
 
A

albie611

good luck with the move......my advise is ....
what ever you do, "DON'T DISTURB THE SAND BED"
if possible drain all the water you can and make up enough water for a 50 %w/c up a few days prior to the move incase you need it in an emergency and have it in the new apartment ready to go. then move the tank with the sand in it(once again "DO NOT DISTURB THE SAND BED", refill the tank with the live rock and old water let the tank settle and get up to temp. test water parameters and do a w/c it needed , then once the tank it stable you can reaclimate the corals and fish..........gl.......al
 
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Carlo

If it's only an inch or two of sand there shouldn't be any problem moving the sand IMHO. It's when you start getting into deep sand beds that you need to take precautions.

I moved a doctors tank with a 6" sand bed via trashcans. The bottom layers were pretty dark but full of critters so he wanted to keep it. What I did was setup canister filter on the trashcans (using micron filters) and processed the sand well for a few days. Every couple of hours I'd stir up the sand pretty well by hand to get as much of it into the water column as possible for the filter to extract it. Overall while a lot of work it went well.

Personally, unless you have a ton of life in a DSB I think it's best to take the top inch and discard the rest. Use fresh clean NON-LIVE sand in the new tank and then add the old 1" sand to it.

With that said when I moved back in April/May I did in fact move my 4/5" sand bed but I didn't use it right away. I precessed it similar to the above "doctors" move and then kept adding more and more of it into my refugium. I've since added a few more inches of "base sand" but everything is doing well.

Carlo
 
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