Changing tank

evan47 · Mar 30, 2021

I have been running my 130l aqua one tank for about 5 years and am now considering moving on the the Fluval flex 123l.
I intend to run the Fluval as a FOWLR set up.
Can I simply remove the contents of the old tank (live rock, live sand, powerbeads and heater), place them in the new tank and let it run with only light feeding until things settle or should I go back to square one with the new tank?
As the new tank lacks a sump I will only be able to put half of my marine pure in the rear compartment of the Fluval as it is an all in one system with a compartment in the rear to house filter media and equipment.

brandon429 · Mar 30, 2021

if you don't prep your live sand a certain way, you can kill all your fish.

but if you prep sand like we do here in this thread, you wont lose them in the transfer.

Official Sand Rinse and Tank Transfer thread

If you are reading this thread to cure a tank invasion from a link I sent you, we do not need to identify your type of invasion here we do not need you to test anything at anytime regarding nitrate, phosphate etc Above all, we do not need to see a microscope slide picture of your invasion at...

www.reef2reef.com

you might read about folks who moved their own tank without sand prep. That's one reef, not 400 as above. to get 400 to align safely, there's certain steps we don't omit. any link from any page in that thread is the same set of moves, none are different.

you can see in study in that thread your marine pure doesn't matter, it wouldn't even matter if you didn't move it, reefs don't need that surface area. they need live rock surface area.

evan47 · Mar 30, 2021

even if I use the live sand that I already have in my old tank? Surely not?

brandon429 · Mar 30, 2021

you can choose your risk as you see fit using that data logged. we would never, ever use even one handful of old sand/1st sentence in the whole post.

we would however use your old sand after its tap rinsed for about two hours straight. total cloudlessness/ examples are on every page it doesn't cause a cycle, it prevents one.

when you move tanks if you input 100% cloudless sand in the new tank, whether its old or new, you'll skip the cycle. move over any degree of unrinsed sand, and you can see on page one the loss threads we collected.

evan47 · Mar 30, 2021

OK, Thank you for the advice.

brandon429 · Mar 30, 2021

the truth is the majority do move tanks with no rinse. about 95% go ok, but they also report emerging rates of cyano and gha after, they don't get a scott-free headache free move using old sand.

only about 5% have actual loss, we think the sand has varying states of decay and although likely not toxic ammonia there are rot compounds in some tanks that will for sure kill fish within an hour, and we've been able to prevent that in every case with a dedicated tap rinse. hope that helps to show why we're doing such crazy stuff to effect tank moves I know it reads crazy lol

Frogspon · Mar 30, 2021

evan47 said:
OK, Thank you for the advice.

You will quickly learn around here that @brandon429 is very passionate about sand and cycles...

brandon429 · Mar 30, 2021

the thread didn’t get to fifty pages by passivity and poor sales he he

or poor results

or with any other peer threads on the matter across the web we can find, that’s one tank transfer thread for all of reefing...popular subject

Lately, the last ten folks tried to show the thread didn't want to prep rinse anyway. Never heard back on their moves

Recently been considering just letting folks move with the normal plan and see how many we get before a Wipeout, linked twice on page on post one they're horrible.

My friend V darn near killed his whole reef recently with a sandbed disturbance. It seems mean not to relay the safest option.