Upgrade and transferring old to new

[USMA36]

I’m awaiting a 240 gallon tank to upgrade my existing 90 gallon mixed reef. Current tank has about 100lbs of live rock. I have another 150 lbs of dry mined rock in a brut can heated with saltwater. I just added microbacter 7 to the brute can. The tank will be here in about 8 weeks. I have a few questions. Should I add food to the brute can water for the bacteria. I also have a large sponge that’s been in my sump for 3 years that I can take out and add to the brute can to help seed the rock. Should I do this now? Once the tank arrives and Gets setup what’s the process to transfer. Ideally I’d like to transfer everything at once since a lot of the equipment is being re used in the new system. I;l be building my aquascape wet as to keep the live rock live. My old rocks all have coral encrusted with full colonies and frags of Both sps and lps. I’d like to minimize coral losses as much as possible. How can I make this work with minimal losses of fish and coral.

 

[Jeepguy242]

When I transferred mine I used my old rock rinsed off well in fresh saltwater and added dry rock. And a bottle of Tim’s.
No cycle at all. Added my corals and fish as soon as I had my rockscape to my liking the next day.
I never had my live rock from the old tank out of water for more than 10 minutes

shook the rock in the old tank. Transferred to fresh saltwater and shook again then into the new tank

 

[t5Nitro]

How did your tank transfer go? I'm about to do a similar transfer and a move about 3 hours away in a few months. Transferring old tank with about 70ish pounds LR to a tank twice the size and adding not too much more dry rock yet, enough for another rock island.

 

[USMA36]

It went well. It’s been running since Halloween. No issues with the transfer. I only moved from the living room to the basement so it wasn’t as bad. I matched the water parameters best I could on both tanks and just swapped everything over all at once. No fish losses.

 

[t5Nitro]

Awesome. 3 hours is hopefully not bad. I'm going to plan on picking up several of the cheap mini live bait air stones from Walmart or something which run off battery and have several 5 gallon pales and coolers, lol. Glad to hear yours went well. I was debating what to do with the rock so this is reassuring. I have more LR than I do dry rock to add for now too so that's favorable.