how should I go about moving my tank

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10gnano

Well-known member
Joined
May 30, 2010
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198
Location
seattle, wa
I'm moving in a couple weeks and am a little unsure on how to go about it. I have moved my tank before but that was only 10-15 minutes down the road. This time it will be an hour and a half move. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

My tank is a ten gallon with a ten gallon sump, mostly sps corals and a few zoas, I have a clown fish and a peppermint shrimp.
 
this is kinda a crazy idea, you may be able to move it in two pieces, the tank, and sump. if i were trying to be extremely lazy i would load tank into vehicle and use an inverter to run circulation and heat this can be done with a cigaret lighter, the tank would have to be covered and overflow blocked, and would be only possible if the vehicle used permitted the location to place on level sturdy surface, pending circumstances to me this would be the easiest. what you think? am i off my rocker?
 
Carefully!...J/K
Seriously though, with that small volume, you can probably just transfer everything from BOTH into a large cooler (with lid), add heater and circulation if you want to run it from your power inverter, and put it back together when you get there. That being said, I would make sure you have plenty of new saltwater mixed and ready just in case (helps keep the gremlins at bay if you're well prepared ahead of time) :)
If not a cooler, a large rubbermaid with lid will probably do the trick as well, but you'll probably want to have a heater because you'll not have much in the way of temp insulation.
Out of curiosity, where are you moving from/to?
 
Thanks for the responses. After a lot of reading this is what I have come up with, let me know what you think. I will get a pretty decent sized cooler so that I can keep enough water in it to cover live rock and have some extra if needed during the move. I will put all my livestock in bags, like they do when you purchase them from a fish store and float them in the cooler. I'm not sure if bagging livestock is necessary but I figure it will help corals/fish from getting crushed from rocks sliding around. As for sand I'm not sure how to go about that. I was planning on keeping it, is this a good idea? the idea was to siphon out almost all of the water from the tank and leave an inch or two to keep the sand bed wet.

Out of curiosity, where are you moving from/to?
I'm moving from Bellingham to Seattle.
 
A guy on CL has free styrofoam coolers he's gving away right now. check the free sction or the post in this forum from earlier today.
 
Why not just leave the sand bed in the 10gal tank with the bottom inch or 2 of water? Is there some reason to remove it?
 
I've read good and bad o leaving it, I was trying to get some other perspectives. I will most likely leave the sand bed.
 

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