Tank Upgrade 30 Gal to 55 Gal. Need someone to double check my thought process.

Rockeye

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Hello,

So my wife and I started a 30 gallon tank back in September. All my parameters are good. We had a 55 gal tank just sitting around so we decided to move everything to the bigger tank.

Currently everything is living in the 30 gallon.

In the 55 I have it about a little over halfway filled with RO from the LFS and home mixed saltwater. We have that fancy BS water to the house so just about all the chemicals are removed from it. I also have a Fluval 307 that was brand new that was going to be used for a 90 gal freshwater, but I wound up getting a different setup for that. I know people think that canisters are Nitrate factories. One day I may setup a sump. Thats just more than I want to toss at this right this moment. I also put down some new dry sand.

The question is, when should I start moving the live rock and sand from the 30 gal to the 55 gal? Should I let the 55 cycle before I do anything with the live rock?
 

Stones-Reef

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ive done 2 different tank transfers over the years on my system. im not sure about canister filters, ive never tried it. but if your intent is to simply transfer everything over and shut down the existing tank, the jump from 30 g to 55 g is not so big as to require cycling the new tank beforehand. You could make the transfer in a single day! Feel free to pm if you have any questions
 

jwilliams860

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Moving some of that live rock over will help seed and cycle the new tank faster. I would move things that you can to kick off the cycle in the new tank and may cut your time in half.
 

TnFishwater98

Drink more fishwater there! And I still want more!
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Yep just like setting up a Qt. Use some of you old tank water and LR and slowly move to new tank. You can keep adding more saltwater to old DT and as you do daily/every other day water changes on your new DT use the oldDT water. Then transfer more of your LR to new DT. If you slowly do this your new tank will only need a week or two. You shouldn’t have any cycling of new tank especially if you do it slowly and use old DT water.
 

fachatga

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I do t see why you can’t just move it all over including the water at once. The balance filled with new water. It’s really no different than a water change since the new tank really isn’t a ton bigger than the old one.
 

brandon429

why did you put a reef in that
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if you move over your current sand as is, you have a ten percent chance of killing your whole tank. that leaves room for the other 90% who pulled it off without loss

conversely, here's fifty pages no loss do what we do here for a solid xfer:


pick any five links and study their whole move, all are the same. doesnt matter what page, someone's getting tap rinsed we can clearly see it.
 

Stones-Reef

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if you move over your current sand as is, you have a ten percent chance of killing your whole tank. that leaves room for the other 90% who pulled it off without loss

conversely, here's fifty pages no loss do what we do here for a solid xfer:
gotta agree here: new sand bed is a must! Melevs reef has some great advice on how to add water to the new sand bed without sending sand flying all over the water column, if you decide to do it all in a single day that is. you could use very small mounds of old sand to seed the new sand bed, but the water and rock will retain the majority of the bacteria.
 

brandon429

why did you put a reef in that
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we mention though to never add the old sand, not one handful, not any of it

first sentence in the thread its so important, we show five tank wipeouts from doing so, the 10% ers.

the 90% ers made the rules for the last two decades and didnt care if the 10% got hammered, we fixed it :)

what we work with there is zero outlier procedure, Melev's has outliers

we are tap rinsing the sand to cloudlessness before use.

that can't be discerned as bad, per the outcomes on file. also standout patterns: no bottle bac used

no ammonia testing, no recycles, only perfect tanks. thats really hard to wrangle into 43 pages but we sure did. tap water did it all, 100% of the outcomes.
 
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Rockeye

Rockeye

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So I am waiting on my second AI Prime 16 light to come in. It should be here tomorrow. Will the live rock that I have in my smaller tank be ok if I move a piece or two to the larger tank and it not have a light on it for about a day?
 

brandon429

why did you put a reef in that
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yes for sure its so tough, even a week wouldnt hurt it in that approach
 

PhilMStudy

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yes for sure its so tough, even a week wouldnt hurt it in that approach
My tank has been setup for 6-7 weeks. I am upgrading stand (long story), would you still suggest not using any of that sand if I temporarily take down tank to switch stands?
 

brandon429

why did you put a reef in that
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The fact remains that unless it’s clean right now via fish rooting about or manual interventions that routinely eject waste, any reef will be more benefitted by installing totally clean sand over used sand. im sure lots of sandbeds are clean enough to move without cleaning, but de-aging the tank has more benefits than keeping the six worms from the sand. We specifically use sand cleaning to fix problem reefs, this would be like acting preemptively for the clean start.

folks have opinions not everyone would agree but my harsh cleaning opinion comes from work threads, in the reefs we work here sandbed cleaning is 100% what attains the fix, should a tank show up with problems.


 

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