Moving Advice

The main concern when moving a tank like that is the sand bed. It can be a toxic wasteland waiting to kill everything.

If you have shallow or no sand, no biggie, get everything into buckets, keep as much tank water as posible, tear it down, move it, set it up & away you go. Going to be a long day.

If you have a deeper sand bed (2 inches or more) take everything out without disturbing the sand bed. Save as much clean water as possible. Then remove sand & move tank. You should rinse out the bottom of the tank, but dont scrub the sides or back. Most of your bacteria is on the surfaces of rocks and even your tank glass

Put it back together without the sand. If you want to go back to sand, add it back in slowly after you have rinsed it. The deeper sand has all kinds of death traps waiting to kill everything.

 

Possibly, however under that top inch is the dead zone. Can you look in the side of the tank & see any layers or changes of color in the deeper sand bed? If so I wouldnt mess with it while you had other stuff in there. You can rinse & clean it & add it later.

Best yet is to buy a new 180 tank set it up in the new place & move everything over slowly. When all empty sell the old tank!

 

During the actual moving process, make sure you have plenty of buckets and heaters lying around. A lot of time will be spent draining your tank and during that time, you don't want any of your critters getting cold. I especially like using a properly cleaned large cooler for corals and live rock with egg crate braces in between to prevent any rolling around. Buckets work well for fish, dividing them up by category. For example, all my CUC went in one bucket, my scooting fish in another, my midas blenny got his own bucket with his rock he hid in, and my clowns got their own bucket with their anemone, etc.. I've never had a deep sand bed so never thought about the problems a deep one could cause, so thanks for the tip Craig. Even with a shallow sand bed, any water left in the tank before you move the sand is going to be a mess so try to remove all your critters beforehand while you can still see them /DesktopModules/ActiveForums/themes/_default//emoticons/smile.gif

 

Coralville bay fish store in iowa city in the resource page has 2 180 gallon acrylic tanks that he just got in last week . I think they are still there ,they are used and need some cleaning but they looked nice. Very big . I would call him and see what he wanted for them if thats something you might me interested in. He said it looked like there were no scratches on them. one had a center overflow the other had overflows at the two back corners.