Moving 29 gal Biocube

[r212019]

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

[r212019]

This is how the tank currently look

[gobytron]

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...

[asylumdown]

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.

[gobytron]

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.

[asylumdown]

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.