dpmamay

I am going to pickup this tank tomorrow morning. It's been neglected and so this is both a mercy purchase for the fish and a bonus to me because of all of the extras the guy sold with his tank. The fish are going in my reef and I am going to keep this system running to culture it's refugium which seemed quite healthy a week ago when I looked at it. The reason for this is my daughter who is 7 has been researching seahorses for about 9 months now and I told her I would get her a dedicated seahorse tank and plumb it into my main reef. So I am going to bring this home, nurse the system back to health and transplant some macro algae from my reef into the main tank and let it grow for about 6 months. When the display and refugium is both full of pods and macro algae I am going to plumb it into my main system and go purchase a couple of seahorses.

Some of the extras I was talking about!


One of the best ways to get started with this hobby is to do your as much research as you can and then go buy someone's setup who is getting out of the hobby. You will pay less than a 1/3 of what it would cost new.

I will take pictures tomorrow of what I use to move everything with and how I do it. This is my third tank purchase/move since July so I am becoming old hat at this.
Number one is to have some water premixed and ready to use to replace any water lost during the move. Especially if you are upgrading during the move. My second purchase was a full 65 gallon reef fully stacked with coral and I moved it into my 90 gallon display so I did need to use an extra 40 gallons or so because some of the water got spilled and a couple of the buckets were too nasty to put back in.

My wife loves it when I pull out Mr. Brute and leave him in my dining room for weeks on end.
So when I move a tank I move not only the normal stuff like the tank, rock, fish, etc...but I also move all of the water! So for that you need lots of buckets. I have about 15 home depot buckets and a bunch left over from buying salt. So they all come with me for transport. I also use the rubbermaid totes for rock and fish, filling them up with only as much water as needed. Another thing to keep in mind is the weather outside. If you are moving in the winter and it's going to take a couple hours for the tear down you have to have a way to keep those fish happy. So it's supposed to be about 14 degrees tomorrow so we should be okay. It's only a 35 gallon with no coral so it won't take that long. By the way I am from Canada so that 14 is in Celsius.

See you all tomorrow morning.
So at 10:15am this morning it was already 23 degrees, that's 73F. So it was a good day to move a tank. We loaded the car with the buckets, hose and towels.

When we got to the house I started by filling the buckets with water until the tank was about 3/4 empty. Then I pulled the LR out and placed it in a rubbermaid tote and put a couple inches of water in there.

Then we placed the fish in one of the buckets and finished loading the car.
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The car ride home was only about 10 minutes. Then we unloaded the car. Setup the stand and I cleaned the glass of the tank. The tank was in worse shape than I thought. The stench was horrendous it was making me heave as I was trying to clean the tank. My wife came over and took over the job for me and did a wonderful job on the glass.

Then I started filling up the tank again from the buckets. One thing I did was mark the refugium bucket because I had placed the LR and macro algae from the refugium in the same bucket and emptied it back directly into the refugium in hopes that alot of the pods would not have been disturbed.


As you can image it stunk alot worse than it looks. This was by far the foulest smell I have smelled.

I placed the LR back in the tank, connected the plumbing and continued filling the tank with the remaining buckets of water.




With all the rock in I started the system back up and got a temp reading of the tank. 74.2 degrees. I then used the same digital thermometer on the bucket with the fish. 74.0 degrees. So with the temp being the same I waited about ten minutes for the tank to settle and placed the fish back in the tank. I had one casualty, a small pygmy angel. I don't think he was doing so well to begin with and the move just did him in.

With the tank running I proceeded to do about a 15 gallon water change. I siphoned out the center and right chamber of the refugium, cleaning and scraping as I drained it. Then replaced the water with slightly warmer makeup water. I also tested the PH and it was only 7.6, not good. The ph of the makeup water was 8.0 using the same ph probe. So I turned down the flow on the return with a built in ball valve and plugged in the pump. I set the water to a trickle for about 30 minutes then opened it up. I have to be careful because the pump almost overpowers the overflow box.

All of the rock and sand were covered with green hair algae coated with a brown cyano. So I placed a filter sock on the overflow drains and placed two Koralia powerheads in the tank and started them up. Also using a turkey baster to blow off some of the rock. I will do this a little at a time until the rocks are clean again.
I also have a new MH HQI 10k bulb to replace the 12k bulb out of the fixture that came with the tank. The guy I purchased this from said this setup was only six months old but by the looks of the rock with all the algae and cyano it's probably older and he hasn't changed his bulbs or his filters in his RO unit.

I tested the water and the ph was about 7.8 (Left), no nitrates (middle) and no phosphates (right).
So last but not least I filled a HOB filter full of carbon, rinsed it and then placed it on the side of the tank. I plan on cleaning one section of the tank and refugium per day. So I will continue to post pictures while I nurse this little system back to health.