Lots of questions about a tank move.

Like the title says I have lots of questions about a tank move I will be doing over the next 2 or more months.I will be down grading to a 75 gal from a 150 gal tank.I need to use some of the old sand and will be cleaning it before the move.I will then seed the new tank with some sand from the other tank.I will also be using a lot of the live rock from the old tank also.MY current problem is my phos and nitrates are high-not detectable but I know they are high from the red slim I haven't been able to get rid of.
So my questions are:
1.Will this work for the sand-I can't through it out and start over, don't have the money-part of the reason for a down grade.
2.I can't nuke the rock because of lots of coral growth on it but since some of has red slime I think there is phos in the rock.What do I do about that?
3.Also I have a lot of acros so how soon can I put them in the other tank?
4.Do I need to transfer some of the water or not because of the nitrate and the phos and if so how much?
I'm sure there will be other questions as I go through this process.
Thank you all very much.
Daniel

 

I just moved my 75gallon into a 90 gallon over the weekend.

I used as much of the water as I could. I bought a couple of 20gal tubs from Lowes and had a bunch of 5 gallon buckets from salt mixes and put the coral/rocks in the tubs and then just water in the others. So far it looks like everything is doing ok and opening up. I would plan out the move before hand though. I didnt really have a plan and winged alot of the move which ended up making it take way longer than expected.

Good luck!

 

Hey doylef4i, I just moved today. A lot of work but everything was successful. I can answer your nitrates question. I had about 20ppm of nitrates in my former tank, and 0ppm in my new one and I was concerned about shocking everything with the drastic change. While the water won't help with getting good bacteria in the tank, it will certainly raise your nitrates, and other trace elements to something closer to your current tank. I was moving from a 46g to a 90g. I don't think there's any rule of thumb for this, but I used 20gallons from my 46g, and the rest with fresh RO/DI water. I have almost 5ppm of nitrates in my new tank now because of that. That's pretty much were I wanted to be and the fish did well with the change. So for a 75g, I'm sure 20 gallons would suffice.

 

i used 2 45gallon cans from wal-mart with wheels on it. moved my 75gallon from one side of the house to the other. reused 80-90% of the water and every thing looked fine the next day.

 

Bump for the morning crew.

 

Why don't you try finding your nitrate and phos problem and fix it now in the old tank, because I would use as much of the old tanks content as you can to have the smallest possible cycle.

As for moving, I got a bunch of 5 gallon buckets with lids from home depot, start by siphoning water evenly into the buckets about half full, add liverock to some, if they house corals then carefully position those between bare rock kind of wedging them into the bucket, after this evenly fill the buckets with the rest of the water.. leave one bucket with just water for all the fish/ shrimp etc... make sure you watch your temp though.. mine dropped to about 70 without a heater for that time. but fortunatly everything lived... as already said plan it all out before hand and it is cake.

 

Anyone else?

 

good luck