Official Sand Rinse and Tank Transfer thread

[gbru316]

Curious to hear your thoughts on frequent (weekly?) sand bed stirring assuming one starts with a clean sand bed.

Seems to me like you could avoid the sand bed disturbance death if you periodically stir it all up and filter out the detritus while it’s in suspension.

Coincidentally, I’m in the middle of doing this cleaning process as I’ve decided to try bare bottom but don’t want to part with the sand yet. So I’ve been pulling it out a few cups at a time and rinsing until clean, then drying and putting into storage in case I want sand again down the road,

 

[brandon429]

Yes agreed can do that successfully

Here's people doing that approach:

" MY WHITE SAND METHOD "

I've always talked about this in the fb groups because i get so many questions and compliments on my sand bed ....well here's my method....note: I've never tried this on a tank older than 3 years !!!! I'm well aware of the problems that can occur on older tanks...this is a "DAILY" method i use...

www.reef2reef.com

 

[brandon429]

If it helps in planning, my summary of this entire thread is that the live rocks set in the display in the new tank are always enough for every reef.

All the surrounding surface area in the form of sand, filter materials including sump bioballs, is expendable

or highly rinsable, same thing. We try to wash the rocks in saltwater after picking them clean with knife tip detail scrapes, like a dentist prep for each reef tooth. All other surfaces can get tap water unlimited rinse. Those extra supports never were required in reefing, so rinsing them clean certainly can't hurt. Because live rocks are enough, what you do with accessory surface area doesn't impact biofilter control of the setup.

The key is moving only perfectly cleaned live rock, zero clouding in new tank, and you will skip cycle every time.

An entire industry exists to sell us things to shore up a reef tank cycle

Considering the patterns we use it seems most of those sales items aren't needed. They're predicated upon someone thinking a reef tank might be running low on bacteria, but they aren't. Moving over clean surfaces will protect your specimens better than any other transfer option, take many pics so next person can study your method

 

[UndergroundReefCo]

@devlinsreef
Also recommended to pattern off five or six prior logged jobs here.

The original description included enough detail i can see you read disassembly/ rip clean threads

If you are using the glass test to verify each rinsed section of sand, so the final wet pile going back into a perfectly cleaned tank is totally cloudless, you're free to use whatever sand you prefer

Don't forget the light reduction at the end, you'd re ramp the light power slowly

most jobs here discuss it which is why studying five or so jobs is likely to catch those details. Nice job planning the move details that will all work for sure

It's all a good order of ops listed. Cover fish, they'll jump and for an hours drive you could easily input bottle bac a tiny bit to support fish transfer along the way as one option. Moving them with pre seeded foam filters from your current tank would be creative

Have a battery powered bait box airstone set ready to use, the live rock can be moved as stated it won't harm anything. That's a water retaining description above nice job on wet newspaper. All my corals could survive that long in wet insulated newspaper carry, so I'm sure your rock will be fine. Have everything rinsed and ready ol in new tank, new water each job shows, so you're just setting clean cloud free live rocks into the tank with rinsed sand and new water matching old salinity and temp.

Those live rocks skip cycle the new setup

Awesome thank you. Seems like I have things outlined pretty well so far. Yes, I am going to be buying new 20 lb. Special Grade Arag-Alive! Reef Sand from BRS. I will rinse this prior to the setup up the reef tank in my home.

Yes thank you for the further clarification on light schedule and ramp up. Okay, I will keep that in mind for bacteria purposes as well.

Good to get some supporting comments on what I have planned thus far and that the live rocks skip that cycle with existing bacteria.

 

[UndergroundReefCo]

Tank transfer complete. I will tell you. I will not be doing another tear down and setup all in one day again LOL. Rinsing the sand and finding this thread was the best thing I could have found. The amount of cloudiness within the sand is unbelievable. Still getting things ironed out with the whole transfer but not dealing with the cloud pool out me in the best spot without harming the fish and coral further. I will be coming back to this thread shortly with more update for everyone out there.

 

[UndergroundReefCo]

Looks like the tank is doing okay, I do have ONE concern. Levels don’t look to bad so far, waiting on an ammonia test kid. Nitrates at 13.5 and phosphate at 0.07. My concern comes with my powder brown and scopas tang are looking they are getting some ich. Any thoughts!?

 

[JonoH]

Looks like the tank is doing okay, I do have ONE concern. Levels don’t look to bad so far, waiting on an ammonia test kid. Nitrates at 13.5 and phosphate at 0.07. My concern comes with my powder brown and scopas tang are looking they are getting some ich. Any thoughts!?

Ich was potentially already present in the system, the move has just stressed them to show it.

I have one clown fish that seems to periodically get some white lumps but then disappear. No other fish have shown any signs of it though!

 

[UndergroundReefCo]

Ich was potentially already present in the system, the move has just stressed them to show it.

I have one clown fish that seems to periodically get some white lumps but then disappear. No other fish have shown any signs of it though!

Yeah totally a fair point and chance. Not entirely sure. Something to keep an eye on, if it gets worse tomorrow I’m gonna do a 10-20% water change to make sure levels are down. I also have dosed microbacter 7 on Sunday and will do that again depending on water change tomorrow or Thursday.

 

[brandon429]

Don’t post any ammonia kit readings here you can see we are on page 58 without any

we do not want them, unless it’s a seneye reading, because non digital kits don’t usually read zero in any reef tank and we don’t want false ammonia stalling panic actions. All your fish are alive because the cycle was skipped just fine. Readings from a calibrated seneye machine are accurate and don’t cause false panic

dont dose bottle bacteria, we are on year nine for this thread using none, because tank transfers don’t harm your cycle.

Agreed about ich: if you haven’t practiced biosecurity (fallowing 100% of tank additions before going into the prior display= corals, clean up crews etc) then upwelling the sand and system can bring on small resurgence at times.


please only add pics of the system. any non digital ammonia test kit reading for nh4 is 100% not wanted, because guessing at colors isn’t an accurate report for a parameter that reads in the thousandths ppm nh3. There are hundreds of thousands of searchable examples of false ammonia readings from non digital test kits, we don’t want that doubt presented here. We only want readings from kits that don’t misread (seneye) or we don’t want them at all, we know how to control ammonia (by making the new system cloudless when it’s built)

nh4 ammonia levels are for freshwater

nh3 is for reefing

guessing at colors on a chart cannot measure nh3 correctly, the estimate will be off the mark by orders of magnitude, which is why there are hundreds of thousands of false stall threads none of which were posted by seneye owners. Api, Red Sea etc measure nh4.

the sole safety angle of the entire thread is being 100% cloudless on the new assembly. If 10% clouding was allowed, that’s where problems arise, but not by ammonia. Ammonia isn’t stored in sandbeds, the clouding waste from the old system can cause other problems though.

 

[UndergroundReefCo]

No worries at all. Was not trying to jeopardize the thread by posting pictures of test kits etc. was just talking about my experience thus far. Totally understand where you are coming from and the inaccuracy of color test and the uproar it could bring.



As far as the ich, not sure what was done previous by the owner. But to my knowledge he did QT and take proper precautions.



Noted in the bottle bacteria as well!



The sand cleaning 100% worked. Here are some pictures to do it justice.



The amount of cloudiness and stuff that came out of the sand bags was unbelievable




Here is some pics and a video of the day after. Given I was down in my basement til 11pm getting this move done. I kept the lights off and this is first thing in the morning to see how things were going. As you can say the water is nearly perfectly clear. All thanks to this thread.







If anything my guess it is the waste from the tank move and the stress of the move causing some problems. The fish were in bins for a bit too long. But that’s a whole different discussion as far as moving a tank and prepping correctly.

 

[brandon429]

I forgot it came from a previous owner, agreed you're doing best as possible. He was likely doing ich management vs exclusion and that suppressive balance can easily be imbalanced when the sand layers are disturbed but in your favor the fish were used to its presence and they have a chance of just fighting it off again

 

[UndergroundReefCo]

I forgot it came from a previous owner, agreed you're doing best as possible. He was likely doing ich management vs exclusion and that suppressive balance can easily be imbalanced when the sand layers are disturbed but in your favor the fish were used to its presence and they have a chance of just fighting it off again

All good, yeah it’s possible. Fish are healthy to begin with. Feeding mysis often and having nori present at all times mostly is my attempt to keep them fat and strong. We’ll see what comes of it.

Overall this thread has been an extreme help.
To think I was going to put those bags of sand in without a rinse doing a tank move would have been nothing short of a disaster.

 

[UndergroundReefCo]

I forgot it came from a previous owner, agreed you're doing best as possible. He was likely doing ich management vs exclusion and that suppressive balance can easily be imbalanced when the sand layers are disturbed but in your favor the fish were used to its presence and they have a chance of just fighting it off again

Did the pictures show up?

 

[brandon429]

Yes just now it did: that's a very clean rinse

Huge stack of rocks and sensitive fish

Thank you so much for completing that on file for us!

 

[UndergroundReefCo]

Yes just now it did: that's a very clean rinse! Huge stack of rocks and sensitive fish

Thank you so much for completing that on file for us!

Okay, wanted to make sure. They are not showing up on my end for some reason. Yeah, fish are fat and healthy and seem to be doing fine. Will continue to monitor things day by day. But overall happy with the move thus far. Happy to document and speak on this to length.

 

[brandon429]

you brought the original light levels down a good bit right? > to be ramped up slowly over the next few weeks/bleaching prevention trick

looks nice there above, not blasting level just crisp blue levels

 

[UndergroundReefCo]

you brought the original light levels down a good bit right? > to be ramped up slowly over the next few weeks/bleaching prevention trick

looks nice there above, not blasting level just crisp blue levels

Yes I brought them down a touch and will ramp up weekly or so depending on how things are looking. Everything seems to be opening up quite nice thus far.

 

[UndergroundReefCo]

you brought the original light levels down a good bit right? > to be ramped up slowly over the next few weeks/bleaching prevention trick

looks nice there above, not blasting level just crisp blue levels

pmd you

 

[brandon429]

reefbuilders has a really good article with pics on sand handling during tank moves

How to Move a Reef Aquarium | Reef Builders | The Reef and Saltwater Aquarium Blog

One of the most dreaded things in life is moving house, factor in moving an aquarium, and stress levels peak. Here’s an informative guide that might help you have a casualty and stress-reduced day…

reefbuilders.com

thought it would be fun to contrast their article to what we've been doing here

Pretty darn solid, it's what we've been using here pretty much. the only small nit picking caveat I'd add is at no time is bottle bac needed as that's not the remedy for what kills reef tanks during failed tank transfers (ammonia control isn't the problem our pages show, it's mixed waste detritus upwelling which isn't ammonia/ammonia isn't stored in a reef's sandbed/ and there's nothing to dose to offset it. upwelled detritus either kills your system or it doesn't)


*they're applying updated cycling science in that article for sure. try and find other published articles that don't hint you'll kill your tank if you remove any bacteria from the sand. 1 of their 4 sand-handling options was to just go instant bare bottom in the new setup, that's very progressive reef microbiology to know we didn't need the sandbed bacteria in the first place.

article score: 99.99% A+

 

[StackTrayce]

40lbs of caribsea aragonite special grade dry sand arrived. First 20lbs or so being rinsed in a bucket. Just pouring the sand from bag into bucket there were clouds of dust. Put hose at bottom of 5g bucket and poured a few cups of sand in, then put smaller bucket lid over hose and sand, then added much more sand on top until about half the sand bag was in bucket. Turned on water slowly, raised flow, saw lots of silty water coming out.
Ran for ~15m, water clear, but I see most water from sand is coming up from one spot. Going to drain the water, transfer sand and hose to 2nd bucket and start a 2nd rinse.