Cycle question

[asylumdown]

Originally Posted by stinky

so say the tank you were doing a swap from was 60g and the new tank was a 100g . Could you just swap everything over ,if you were not adding anything new. Except for the water you have to add to fill the extra 40g ? It would be just like doing a 40g water change?

that's what I would do. Personally I wouldn't even take the water. It would be like a big 100% water change, which every once in a while isn't such a bad idea to do, but that idea freaks some people out.

The only thing I would never take with me from one tank to another was the sand. Sand beds fill up with so much gunk and detritus over time that I think transferring a sand bed from one tank to another will cause more problems than it's worth. In that case you'll lose whatever nitrification capacity your sand was adding, but then I'd just test for ammonia every day for a week or so and dose prime if anything popped up.