Moving 29 gal Biocube
 

I'm moving a 29 gal Biocube this weekend and I'm looking for some advice/help. The tank currently has about 20lbs of live rock and a sand bed. There is currently no fish in the tank. If I drain the tank almost completely but leave enuf water to keep the sand sub merged, will that work? I plan to move the tank water into a bucket with the love rocks as well. When I get to my final destination, can I put the rock back in the tank and fill it back up with the saltwater in the bucket?

Another thing, I don't really plan on putting any fish in the tank for about a month, how long do I keep the lights on everyday and do I need to feed the rocks or add anything to the tank?

I'm fairly new to this so I want to do everything right. I'm in no rush to add anything to the tank, I want to make sure that the new placement of the tank doesn't cause any issues with heating and what not. Please help

This is how the tank currently look

I would leave the sand in, as long as it stays wet, you should keep some of the beneficial fauna in there.

You can do as you described and just put the rock and water back into the tank, especially since you don't have any fish. If it were me, Id use 50% old and 50% new water.

you shouldnt need to feed the tank anything.
You don't have to leave the lights on at all if you have no coral or fish but leaving the lights on for the usual amount of time (8-12 hours) you might see some unexpected growth of an organism or two...

yah so long as you keep everything that might have life on it wet, I think you're good to go. With nor corals or fish I don't even think saving the old water is all that important to be honest, the only reason to re-use it would be to save on salt. So long as the new water is salinity matched, it's not going to harm the bacteria on your rocks and in your sand one bit to do a 100% water change.

Unless you're testing for everything and are 100% sure ALL parameters are bang on, a 100% water change is never a great idea.

There is a lot more than salinity changes that can shock or kill flora and fauna in your aquarium.

I respectfully but completely disagree. I have a 4 gallon coral only pico tank that gets a 100% water change every week. I don't even bother matching temperature all that carefully any more, though I wouldn't recommend that to someone. That tank is thriving, and is the second tank I've maintained that way, and I got the idea from Advanced Aquarist's EcoReef One, which used the same method.

I recently saw an article on... reef builders I think, about a man in Australia with a full blown reef who's colour blind and can't read the colours of a test kits, so instead of testing for calcium and alkalinity, he just does 90% or more water changes on his large reef system. It looks like the only reason he doesn't do 100% changes is because he needs to leave enough water in the bottom for the fish. That system could have easily won any number of forum tank of the month contests.

There was another article on reef builders recently championing the benefits of very large water changes as they can single handedly fix any number of water chemistry problems.

People are always afraid of 'shocking' their systems, but I have yet to see any good evidence of a case in which a parameter difference other than temperature or salinity (and even those seem to have a pretty forgiving margin) could lead to any sort of harm. Maybe pH, but the differential in pH you'd need to seriously harm or 'shock' most things is going to be larger than what you should ever have between the old water and the new.

Seeing as the only thing in this system has already survived a trip around the world in nothing more than wet newspaper, I'd say the risk to doing a 100% water change with a good quality salt that is matched in salinity and temperature is zero. If it were me and I had a heavily loaded SPS system, I'd probably still do a 100% water change as it's a perfect opportunity to reset the chemistry, and any imbalances in chloride, sodium, and sulphate that may have developed over the course of dosing mag, calcium, and carbonate.

The risk comes from the amount of time things spend out of water, or in a container that isn't heated and has no aeration.

hmm, maybe the article about large water changes and the australian guy were the same article:

http://reefbuilders.com/2013/05/21/f...lems-95-water/

Many of the organisms we're so worried about shocking you can't see.
In a pico, you really have no choice but to do large waterchanges.

I would bet your biofilter sucks in that thing as you are constantly setting it's establishment back every time you "shock" it.

You may have never personally seen any negative effects, but you would if for example you had the exact same tank set up and just did 20% water changes weekly to compare it too.

The article on large water changes likely has accomplished aquarists who do test and calibrate their water before doing a large water change.

Again, I have to completely disagree. If you're using a high quality salt, which more than likely is the same salt you used to make the batch of water that you're replacing, the differences in chemistry are going to be vanishingly small. In a worse case scenario, you'll have water that's severely depleted in carbonate, calcium, and magnesium if you've got lots of actively growing stony corals in the tank, but if you're doing it right, they shouldn't be depleted to the point where anything in the tank is at risk of damage. In this tank, there's nothing in it that's using anything, so the new water, assuming he's using the same salt, should be darn near exactly the same as the old water.

Doing a 100% water change will simply bring all the levels of all the ions back to exactly where they were when you first mixed your salt and added things to your tank. The bacteria that do all the biological processing in our tanks are, for the most part, aerobic, so briefly exposing the substrates they're on to air isn't going to do anything unless you leave it long enough to dry out. That large reef system I linked to is loaded with fish, if doing a 95% water change really did anything at all to the biological filter, it should have experienced a major ammonia spike every week. Considering how beautiful and healthy it is, that's clearly not the case. Here's a link to another large tank in Australia that gets regular, near 50% water changes: http://www.masa.asn.au/phpBB3/viewto...f=147&t=234823. It's a slightly different method, and those two Australian tanks are only possible due to their proximity to the ocean (I can't fathom the cost of mixing 200 gallons of high quality salt water every week), but the principle is the same - they rely on massive water changes to bring all the levels back in-line with NSW. If doing a 100% water change damages something in my pico, I should also have expected to see a spike in ammonia after each change, as I still feed those corals meaty foods several times a week. Nothing of the sort happens, nor does it bother any of the bristleworms that have colonized the rock structure, the copious amount of pods, or the stomatella snails that I somehow managed to get in there.

We've gotten in to a weird habit in this hobby of seeing new salt water as toxic or something. Completely mixed new salt water (assuming it's a good salt and has appropriate levels of the right ions - the only kind you should be using in a reef anyway) is the standard to which we are trying to return the water in our tanks to with all the fancy dosing, nutrient export systems, and additives we add. Skipping all that extra work and just replacing the water outright does the exact same thing we're already doing with the dosing, and has been shown in both small and very large systems to not only not be dangerous, but to actually greatly improve the system. Damage to the biological filter is testable - if bacteria die, there will be an ammonia spike. I've never seen one, the other systems that use large water changes don't see them, so from my point of view, saying large water changes are bad because of an undefined threat to something you can't see that has no testable or noticeable outcome either in the chemistry (other than parameters being returned to optimal concentrations) or the macro biology sounds like superstition more than science.

If someone shows me a video under a microscope of an established bed of nitrifying bacteria suddenly expiring when they are taken from water with a dKH of 7 and placed in salinity and temperature matched water water with a dKH of 9, I will eat my words. Aquatic life is far more resilient than we give it credit for.

egads, sorry for the hijack. good luck with the tank move.

If salt comes from the same BATCH, you can expect similar enough parameters from one bucket to the next but same brand?

No way...

Making salt is far from an exact science and this is a pretty big assumption for you to make.

You can probably get by a okay with your logic int his hobby but if you talk to any reefer worth his salt they'll tell you continuity is by far the best thing that you can offer your microcosm.

and a large tank can much better handle a 50% water change as that;s the whole appeal to a large tank, the ability to better manage fluctuations that may be detrimental to a smaller system.

and even in a smaller tank, a 50% water change is not a 100% water change.