Advice for a Tank Move across town?

[wpeterson]

Good news/Bad News - It looks like we're closing on a house soon, but that means moving our small 40BR humble reef.

I was planning to setup a new 40BR as a holding tank at the new house in advance and let it cycle as an AIO/holding tank.

Rough plans are:
1) Setup holding tank w/ sand & cycle
2) Extract live rock/coral into buckets/containers
3) extract small fish into one container, larger fish on their own
4) extract refugium chaeto/rocks/etc into container
5) dump current 4" sand bed or at least clean/recycle it
6) Move tank/sump as mostly empty
7) Setup sump/display plumbing, add new sand - let it run/settle for 24-48 hours while coral/fish in holding tank
8) Move everything over to new setup in new house

Any thoughts/advice on this? Is it worth dumping the current sandbed in our display? (It's < 6 months old) I wasn't planning to clean/scrape the current display, but do a best effort to remove saltwater/sandbed before transport.

 

[jamesdong009]

Congrats on the house!

Looks like you have things pretty well planned out.

I would add these on hand as well:

-Battery or electric air pumps if fish and corals are going to be sitting in the buckets for awhile.
-Extra saltwater in case of emergencies.

Your sand bed is pretty new so I'm not sure how much detritus it has accumulated or how much nutrients would be released when disturbed. Wet sand weighs a ton so it's good that you plan on removing it before moving the tank. Safest bet would be to start with new but I'm also pretty lazy when it comes to cleaning

 

[phg1960]

6) Move tank/sump as mostly empty

Do that with both empty. As JamesDong stated, wet sand weighs a ton. The minor stresses put on a tank during a move are greatly increased with sand and/or water present in the tank.

 

[wpeterson]

Thanks for the advice, guys.

I'm thinking of setting up a second tank/stock tank full of water so that thing are only in buckets for transport for an hour or two. That system will have heat/circulation to give me time to get things setup and moved over slowly in the new location.

 

[Nanoreef15]

Ohh boy, you going to move again? You moved from Bos to BAR and back to bos again and now moving again (all in less than 2 yrs?). Let me know if you need a hand. Did you bring those colorful cap corals with you when you moved from BAR to Bos

Sent from my GT-I9192 using Tapatalk

 

[wpeterson]

We didn't want to move out to CA, but it was a work thing I needed to do. Now that we're back we're buying a place (tomorrow) and never moving again.