Changing substrate, need advice

[cid]

Good morning R2R, I'm a newb in search of advice.

My family and I were given a 2nd hand Redsea Max 130 2 years ago and it has been a joy for all of us. The previous owner had if for 7, maybe even 8 yrs., also running as a FOWLR. It had been running empty for almost 2yrs. before it found it's way in to our living room. Right now we have a Coral Beauty, a sixline wrasse, a royal gramma, a yellow tail damsel, 3x blue-green chromis, a yellow damsel that I'm not entirely sure what it even is(a tonga damsel maybe?), 6-8 hermit crabs, 2 turbo snails, and 2 peppermint shrimp. The only thing I wish I had done was change the substrate, I hate the crushed coral. Latley we've been thinking about trying our hand at keeping a few corals but before we take the plunge, I want to make the change to sand and could use any tips, or advice.

I've been scooping out some CC with my net every couple of days, while continuously adding new salt water to account for displacement and periodically testing for ph, am, nitrites and nitrates. My plan is, once I get to almost bare bottom, to remove the live rock, live stock and most of the water into buckets and shop vac the last of the cc out. Replace the base of my LR, add new sand and then most of the old water.

 

[bond300]

Well Sound like a good plan....I had to transfer all my items from my 75-90G What size is your current tank? I would transfer all my water to the new tank......rock the repeat?

 

[cid]

Thanks. It's 34 gallons and I hope I can salvage all of the water.

 

[cid]

Okay so, over the past 3 days I've scooped out around 7 to 8 lbs of CC and I have about 30lbs left. Today me test was 7.8,0,0,60. My ph is always right around 8.0 and 60ppm is pretty high for me as far as nitrates go. Should I give it a few days? Or are these parameters acceptable enough to continue?

 

[nazzman]

I took out almost all water put all rock and livestock in rubbermaid totes sucked out sand with wet vac and went barebottom went pretty smooth

 

[cginter]

60ppm for nitrates is getting up there. I'm guessing from you removing and stirring up your sand bed your releasing nitrates into your tank.

IMO i would remove some of the crush coral as you do water changes to reduce rise in nitrates.

 

[Isgon26]

Your nitrates are already high I would continue to remove the sand and then do a large water change afterwards. You will probably have to do several water changes. I use Red Sea NoPox gets rid of the nitrates and phosphates rather quickly.

 

[cid]

Thanks everyone, for the advice. I greatly underestimated the amount of detritus I would be disturbing and it took a couple of days to get everything back to normal, but everything went pretty good. I couldn't be happier with the result and I'm very glad I decided to go ahead with it.

Before:

After:

 

[Eckolancer]

Should have stayed bare much easier to clean up.

 

[gemini9]

Very nice! Now all you need are a few snails and hermits.

 

[zemuss]

IMO I would have started with a good vaccuming of the substrate a few times to get all of the detrius out of the system. Then started the sand removal but I would have tanking the sand out all at once then did a water change. Testing everything and did another water change if nitrates were detected. However I would take the fish out before this because the sand removal would have driven them crazy.

Just my ..02