Moving my tank

[gmcpickup66]

Ok so I'm planning on moving my current tank to another house. I was wondering what everyone suggest. Should I store the current water and re use it or do fresh new salt water? Its only a 15 min ride to the other house. Also can anyone think of possible hiccups I should try to avoid in this transition? Thank you in advance.

[chopper320]

I would have plenty of fresh saltwater ready to go just in case. You can keep most of the old water but I would leave behind the last bit that is full of debris from moving your rock and stuff.

Not sure if you have a sand bed but be careful with that. I think most people recommend either using new sand with just a little seed sand from your old tank or rinsing the old sand really well if you plan to re-use it.

I don't know how big your tank is but I recently moved a 40 gallon from one house into a new 80 gallon at another and it went pretty smooth. I just used a ton of 5 gallon buckets to keep my livestock in with the tank water and it all did ok.

[crawlerman]

I was about to ask the same thing. I am buying a 210 that is set up and running. It's an hour away and I'm sure it will take me some time to get everything set up. I have a 38 gallon filtered bait tank that I use for shad/herring. Can I put the fish in that or am I better off bagging them individually? What is the minimum amount of water that I should save from the existing set up?

[gmcpickup66]

My tank is a 75 gallon with 20 sump. It's only about 6 months old so hoping I can just use the same sand since it's not too established.

[Kevin Guthrie]

+1 on @chopper's advice to prepare water ahead of time at the new place, and on 5 gallon buckets. Half-full 18 gallon roughneck totes work too. Line with garbage bags as needed to avoid sloshing.

I would not move a tank with anything in it. When you remove the sand you will know whether you want to move it or dump it.

@crawlerman, a half full 38 gallon tank is 150+ pounds...

Allow a very long day for the move.

[exsequor]

Keep as much *clean* NON-SANDY water from your tank as possible. Have MORE fresh saltwater on hand available then is necessary JUST IN CASE. But you want to use as much water from your tank as possible, because you want all the balanced biology (bacteria colonies and what not) from your established tank which will help you a lot more then using all fresh salt water/

[Sinn Sage]

If you are going to reuse the old sand, rinse it with new saltwater and store the sand in a bucket filled with another batch of new saltwater.

This will help keep the good bugs from dying off while you move from one tank to other.

[BrettDS]

Keep as much *clean* NON-SANDY water from your tank as possible. Have MORE fresh saltwater on hand available then is necessary JUST IN CASE. But you want to use as much water from your tank as possible, because you want all the balanced biology (bacteria colonies and what not) from your established tank which will help you a lot more then using all fresh salt water/


This isn't really necessary. The bacteria colonies that your tank needs are in the rock and sand... there is very little bacteria floating around in the water column.

Keeping the water does allow you to keep the water chemistry (salinity, ph, alkalinity, etc) the same and there is something to be said for that, but in my opinion it's not worth carrying 75 gallons of water (at 8lbs/gallon) just for that. Your back will be breaking that day as it is after moving the rock and sand and everything else.

Making new water at the new location will be considerably easier and obviously you want to match the salinity and other parameters as close as possible, but moving the fish to new water will be no worse than when you first got them from the store and transferred them into your tank.

[gmcpickup66]

Ok thank y'all for y'alls input. I deff got some fun ahead of me lol.

[nuttyd]

Take the opportunity to shake the rocks out. Use a five gallon bucket filled with saltwater and shake each rock in it. Cleans out the detriment that settles in the cracks. Throw bucket of water away at end.

[BrettDS]

I posted this a while ago in another thread, but I'll copy and paste it here because a lot of it still applies.

---------------------------------

I went through something similar recently. I moved from one house to another and upgraded my 75G tank to a 220. I could have them both set up at once, because they were in different houses, but they were 20 minutes apart and going back and forth would be a pain, so I transferred everything at once.

I got the 220 set up ahead of time and filled with water, but it had no sand or rock. On moving day I went to the house with the 75 with about 20 five gallon buckets. I first grabbed all of the corals I could easily remove from the rocks and put them carefully in a bucket, then I removed all the rock and put them in buckets. Any rocks that still had corals or anemones attached were carefully placed in a separate bucket. I quickly checked each rock for hitch hikers and put the crabs, shrimp, and snails I found in a separate invert bucket.

Once the rocks were out it was pretty easy to net the fish and the remaining inverts and they went into buckets as well.

I reused my sand because it was only 7 months old, so once everything else was out I scooped out the sand and it went into additional buckets. In the end I wound up using 16 five gallon buckets.

http://uploads.tapatalk-cdn.com/20160324/07df2b5101d71ea6a364b7e67d22a81e.jpg

I drove it all back to the house with the 220 and put the sand in first, then the rocks, then the fish and inverts. I didn't reuse any of the water from the original 75. There is very little, if any, biological filtration bacteria in the water, so about the only benefit of reusing the water would be to try keep the water chemistry parameters as close as possible to the old tank, but in my case I figured that 75G of water wouldn't really make a significant difference in a 220G tank, plus I didn't want to bother carrying any additional (very heavy) buckets from the other house, and finally, the water that I did have in the buckets with the rocks and sand and such was pretty cloudy with detritus, so I didn't want to reuse it anyway.

Over the next few days I checked my ammonia levels frequently... Twice a day for the first couple of days, then once a day for a bit longer and I never saw any detectable levels of ammonia. It's been almost two weeks since the move and everything is doing well and I didn't lose any fish or inverts.

You can probably use a similar method for your transfer... Put everything in buckets, then take down the 36 and put up the 75, then transfer everything into the 75. Since you don't have RODI water in the 36, I would plan to start the 75 with all new water. I only have a 75 gallon per day RODI filter, so I started making water about a week before I was ready to put up the 220 and I just used 6 44G trash cans to hold the water I was making, then when the 220 was up I pumped it from the trash cans to the tank. Obviously you will want to make and mix your new water ahead of time so you don't have to wait when everything is sitting in buckets.

[bmackcw]

This isn't really necessary. The bacteria colonies that your tank needs are in the rock and sand... there is very little bacteria floating around in the water column.

Keeping the water does allow you to keep the water chemistry (salinity, ph, alkalinity, etc) the same and there is something to be said for that, but in my opinion it's not worth carrying 75 gallons of water (at 8lbs/gallon) just for that. Your back will be breaking that day as it is after moving the rock and sand and everything else.

Making new water at the new location will be considerably easier and obviously you want to match the salinity and other parameters as close as possible, but moving the fish to new water will be no worse than when you first got them from the store and transferred them into your tank.

I'm about to move a 55g to a new home down the street and my LFS guy says this as well. "Nice, but only about 3-5% of bacteria is in the water."

[pisanoal]

I'm about to move a 55g to a new home down the street and my LFS guy says this as well. "Nice, but only about 3-5% of bacteria is in the water."

I don't know about the percentage, but this is true. However, it is much cheaper to reuse most of your saltwater if you have the buckets lying around. If you have to buy them, then it might not be.