Moving plus upgrade - start over with fresh LR?

[bzafish]

I am moving in a few months and currently have a 6 year old 70G reef. It has its troubles over the last 1.5 years with Aiptasia and Bubble algae, sometimes other things from time to time. I am pretty tired of fighting aiptasia especially, every time I win it just comes back a few months later.

In the move I am planning to upgrade to a 160G reef instead. I am thinking that maybe I should just load that up with TBS live rock with their “new tank” two shipment system, then only move over my livestock. I am willing to give up my existing corals/anemones if I get a cleaner start. The other option is just to move everything over and accept my fate in the new tank, likely replacing the sand bed and augmenting with some TBS LR to get enough mass.

1) has anyone done a ‘restart’ of a tank like this where you redo the whole thing and move over your fish after the cycle?
2) is a full load of TBS package going to be enough bio after cycling to support a bunch of existing fish (clown pair, tomini tang, blenny, anthias, small wrasse, filefish that won’t eat aiptasia)
3) people’s experience with TBS cycling, can you get it done and fish ready within 2 weeks?

Would like to also know if it’s just wasted effort as I assume eventually all this pest stuff will come back and I will get new problems with TBS rock anyway…

 

[logibear]

I’m by no means an expert but one of the many benefits of tbs rock/sand is that given it is never out of water it comes as close to an instant cycle as possible so I think you would likely be able to add them easily within 2 weeks. Their new tank set up is a lot of rock, about 2 lbs per gallon with most recommendations being about 1 lb per gallon being needed so it is a large load of bacteria and that doesn’t even include the sand. The biggest drawback to live rock like that is are you willing to take the risk of the hitchhikers common to their rock? Things like gorilla crabs and other not reef safe crabs potentially? Hope this is of some use to ya!