Tank transfer logistics

[Gatorpa]

For sure. It’s actually a service I provide for my clients. Every 2-3 years, regardless of what is going on in the tank, I just rip it apart and redo it. Pretty much like you said…all livestock and rock out, 90-95% of the water out, and then dig into the sand and wash it out, drain the garbage water, and set it back up.

The reason I do it is because it rejuvenates the system

Interesting.
Seems like a lot of work and tough to deal with mega colonies.

 

[Gregg @ ADP]

Interesting.
Seems like a lot of work and tough to deal with mega colonies.

I don’t do it for free

 

[Gatorpa]

I don’t do it for free

What’s the biggest set up you ever do?

 

[Gregg @ ADP]

What’s the biggest set up you ever do?

That I’ve ever done period, or that I’ve torn down and set back up?

Biggest reef that I’ve ever maintained was 2800gal.

Biggest reef I’ve torn down and redone for the hell of it? Probably around 1000gal

 

[Jedi1199]

You're ignoring the fact that the biofilter does not colonize every square inch of surface area - its growth is limited by the current bioload. If unwashed sand releases a significant amount of decaying matter, it will overwhelm the existing biofilter the same way adding 10 fish to a newly cycled tank will.

*If you personally are in the habit of stirring up your entire sandbed once a month, then obviously your sand will not accumulate the same amount of biological material that most established tanks do. Your situation may be so different from the majority of reefers that comparing your tank move to others' is pointless

This is true of everyone. NOBODY else has the same exact tank as anyone else.

The statement that not all surface area has cycling bacteria is false. EVERY single surface in a system is a place for cycling bacteria to grow.

Also, I never said I stir the sand bed "once a month" I stir it up maybe 3 times a year, which equates to once every 4 months.. MORE than enough time for the "catastrophic" scenario to reveal.

We are arguing a moot point here. There is clear evidence that BOTH methods work.

 

[Gregg @ ADP]

You're ignoring the fact that the biofilter does not colonize every square inch of surface area - its growth is limited by the current bioload. If unwashed sand releases a significant amount of decaying matter, it will overwhelm the existing biofilter the same way adding 10 fish to a newly cycled tank will.

*If you personally are in the habit of stirring up your entire sandbed once a month, then obviously your sand will not accumulate the same amount of biological material that most established tanks do. Your situation may be so different from the majority of reefers that comparing your tank move to others' is pointless

What we’re talking about is transferring sand, correct?

It’s easy, and if it’s done as I described, there should be no appreciable increase of load for nitrifiers to have to process. If people moved their tanks and did the same method for sand that I do and the tanks then crashed, it was for some reason other than the sand.

 

[Jedi1199]

What we’re talking about is transferring sand, correct?

It’s easy, and if it’s done as I described, there should be no appreciable increase of load for nitrifiers to have to process. If people moved their tanks and did the same method for sand that I do and the tanks then crashed, it was for some reason other than the sand.

@Gregg @ ADP , you and I agree on this. Apparently we are in the minority opinion. I am fine with that, let the sheep follow the other sheep.

 

[Gregg @ ADP]

@Gregg @ ADP , you and I agree on this. Apparently we are in the minority opinion. I am fine with that, let the sheep follow the other sheep.

Yep. I’m almost always in the minority opinion on this forum. But what do I know? I’ve only worked professionally on reef systems for 30 years.

 

[brandon429]

Team

given the ten thousand seneye owners who can now precisely observe what ammonia does and twenty or so of them have taken part in rip clean threads we no longer think ammonia is stored in a sandbed

none of their seneyes show ammonia spikes when transferring or moving around old sand


it was again something forum posters made up bc it sounded fitting, I’m included, I’ve said it too in years past before seneye


that being said, there’s still only one tank transfer thread and all losses are stopped by preventing all waste clouding and by never using a handful of old sand. 99% would have made an o.k. transfer never rinsing (They’d get a cyano outbreak for sure and likely gha though) but we do the rinse to even out thode 1% potential loss tanks

everyone rinses clean then nobody has a loss.


Something is in the cloud, it’s not ammonia, my next best guess is its not any gas its mixed states of bacteria and lysed/rotting irritants from bacteria or their decaying irritants and compounds.


there is also potentially latent fish disease harbored in sand and rock detritus/organics, in Jays forum we are seeing and discussing a new trend where no disease prep systems/ skip fallow and qt systems/ didnt have disease outbreak and after a move they get wiped out…easily attributed to ammonia before we could measure it accurately but no longer the case now that we can.


per November of 2022, the only time a reef tank can’t control ammonia is during a fish kill event where the fish are left to rot inside. Ammonia never rises from a sandbed or rises before a fish kill, it only rises after a fish kill where the mass was left to rot. A multiple fish kill, not one or two. Any reef tank can handle a degrading fish and not lose ammonia control, that too has been tracked on more than one seneye thread.

 

[BaliReefBox]

This question has no definitive right or wrong answer imo. Every tank is so different that one senario that works for one tank might not for another. imo its up to the reefer to read all they can and try to make an informed decision and act on it. We all seem to be going in cirlces just like the "who hosts who" adage

 

[brandon429]

It’s only a matter of debate if someone wants to not rinse their sand. We are positive what happens if they rinse completely / 100% safe transfers. Leaving a cloud in the sand or rocks is the sole cause of a biological tank crash during moves, it’s not what’s removed, it’s whats left to ride over in whole or in part that’s a risk. Nobody knows what the compound(s) are causing the loss. It’s not ammonia, in Randy’s article on ammonia or a Bingman article they’re not writing to watch out for a sandbed as an ammonia source

Reefers online placed ammonia in the bed searching for api .25 reading justification/ no joke that’s the origination. Same origination for the claim of ‘mini crash’ aka partial ammonia control loss in reefing: doesn’t happen. Doesn’t ever happen on seneye nh3


even one handful of sand from the old tank is a risk. It’s a disease emergence risk, it’s a fish killer risk and I don’t want to link the thread this comes from as nobody wants a fish loss focus highlight/ just have to trust me / not worth it. One handful of old sand is one quart of old oil you want to leave in the bmw at oil change time, because someone on the web said that’s better than a full oil change with filter change.



Think about this regarding the forum adage to transfer some of the old sand:

look at the handful of sand. It’s not writhing worms or a gaggle of pods, it’s calcium carbonate and mud. you can’t even see anything alive while staring right into it

We think that tiny handful of microscopic animals is the sole source of regeneration for the new bed? It’s the rocks, the new sandbed fills with life on repeat because live rock animals are sandbed animals even though I’m aware per Shimek, regarding oceanic strata, it doesn’t work that way.


among caribsea bagged sand, and reef tank mulm and biota, it works that way…what oceans do doesn’t apply much to our live sand beds in a reef tank.

and if ocean studies did apply, anyone who added a sandbed would get a nitrate reduction zone vs a nitrate production zone which we now know them to mostly be.

live rock fauna is sandbed fauna they’re not isolated zones. In the tank transfer thread we routinely get scope pics and phone pics showing pods on the glass a couple weeks after full rip cleans.


end rant lol but only for this post.

there is only one safe way to transfer other people’s tanks on the internet while sitting on ones couch- and that’s everyone tap rinses the sand without question. Move no clouding

 

[Gregg @ ADP]

This question has no definitive right or wrong answer imo. Every tank is so different that one senario that works for one tank might not for another. imo its up to the reefer to read all they can and try to make an informed decision and act on it. We all seem to be going in cirlces just like the "who hosts who" adage

But it does have a definitive answer. This is mathematical. This is chemistry. This is ecology. This is all carrying capacity, density-dependent/limiting factor/sigmoid curve stuff. It’s really not subjective.

One of the primary criteria for legitimizing investigations in science is ‘Can your investigation be replicated, and will I get similar results?’

The answer is: yes.

How? Basic math. It is literally impossible, mathematically, to overwhelm your ‘biofilter’ if you do the method I described. Chemically mathematically impossible. This isn’t about ‘people’s experiences’. It’s about the bacterial K of your system and exact quantities or concentrations of NH3 that are left in your sand bed after stirring your sand bed in 5% of your aquarium volume, piling it up, removing the water, placing the sand bed into a new tank, and the (as one should) slowly adding water to the tank. It’s not even close. If you got any NH3 reading, it would be for about 10 minutes as the nitrifiers in the system oxidized it.

Not sure why people think this is an opinion.

 

[brandon429]

I agree, any aquaculture fish /tilapia / high production carry stress on biofilter setups have all loading and protein input and weight gains pre calculated, biofilter science is well-known. Wastewater industry for city bioloading is precision science the same, I think reefing has yet to incorporate those other industries already mapped out


a basic cycling chart was all we needed pretty much. Digital studies using nh3 / seneye arent showing ammonia control to take longer than ten days, for example and this deposition rate is well-known in the wastewater industry as well. There aren’t stuck cycles in reefing because there aren’t varying cycling charts. Somehow reefing always tries to go flat earth against the other well known ammonia consultant industries

 

[zimmer]

So many different experiences! At some point, I suppose you just do what feels right for your situation and have this awesome forum on speed-dial for help

zimmer

another way to see the matter is there are two different forms of safety in the job you're considering

there's what worked for one person/they relay it to you and if all variables stated and unstated align, you get the same outcome


and then there's what works for solely other's tanks...threads that do tank transfers and document things through all variables. I guarantee you that all losses associated in tank moves, including fish wipeouts and coral loss after the move, came from unrinsed systems that transferred over waste, thinking it was better to move as much bacteria as possible

the entire hobby is trained that we're consistently low on water bacteria, in water, and cleaning = destabilization but that's false. cleaning = stabilization and removal of irritants tbd. it's not ammonia, seneye owners can attest

we think it's mixed states of bacteria/bacterial compounds upwelled during transfer events, rock slides, powerhead dislodges / name your causative. it's always a nutrient upwelling for the few times losses occur in tank transfer.


we are out to page fifty on the official tank transfer thread of zero losses for one sole reason: every entrant regardless of reason for posting rinses their entire sandbed in tap water 100% until it's cloudy, final rinse in ro water or saltwater/then it's ready for use.

by streamlining all posters regardless of presentation reason into a guaranteed sandbed only consisting of sand grains, no waste, we have a perfect outcome. cover any fish as you hold them in totes, we had jumper fish before but not any tank crashes.

the nutrients in the end don't matter, you're testing for dissolved nutrients that's only one viable pathway

the other pathway is high suspended feed/protein and low dissolved waste which a brand new transferred system with a rinsed bed can attain, you just take advantage of that uber clean system and feed it like you stole it.

the cleaner you transfer over a system, the least clouding that transfers among rocks and sand, the more perfect the outcome in public tanks numbering in the several hundreds now.

if you hesitantly rinse things out of fear of bacterial loss, that does more harm than good.

I have to say that the thread you reference was very convincing! I went with new rinsed sand. 2/3 fresh mixed water, the rest old water. Rock and corals are in the new tank after spending the night tucked into a tote with heat and flow. No apparent losses. Will move fish maybe tonight. They are happy in a QT for now.

Parameters SG 1.025; pH 8.5 (mine always runs high-not sure why); Alk 8.9; phos .22; NO3 5-12 range. The water is almost totally clear after 5 hours of circulation through the sump. Adding bottled bacteria and keeping a close eye on the chemistry for changes.

Whew! That was a big undertaking. I walked through it many times in my head and read a lot here. Very glad for that - having a thought out plan is key. I really appreciate the knowledge that is shared here.

 

[brandon429]

I forgive you for using bottled bacteria

 

[zimmer]

I forgive you for using bottled bacteria

Lol I have an open bottle & figured it wouldn’t hurt.

 

[Gatorpa]

I forgive you for using bottled bacteria

Yeah funny never had an issue with multiple moves before the bottled stuff came out.

Good for who every came up with it to make a buck.

 

[Gregg @ ADP]

there is also potentially latent fish disease harbored in sand and rock detritus/organics, in Jays forum we are seeing and discussing a new trend where no disease prep systems/ skip fallow and qt systems/ didnt have disease outbreak and after a move they get wiped out…easily attributed to ammonia before we could measure it accurately but no longer the case now that we can.

Can you give a link to this? I want to contribute if possible.

I haven’t quarantined a fish, medicated a fish, run a fallow period, etc in over 20 years. Back in college I read some research on how the immune-response to external parasites works, and haven’t looked at a fish med or done anything of note to reef tanks to prevent parasite breakouts since. Thanks.

 

[Gregg @ ADP]

Yeah funny never had an issue with multiple moves before the bottled stuff came out.

Good for who every came up with it to make a buck.

Seriously.

Practically every square nanometer of the Earth’s surface is covered with bacteria, but suddenly we need it packaged for us.

 

[shadyraro]

This thread is a very interesting read. I was going to ask the question about reusing a sand bed when moving my 60g 1.5 yr old tank next week, but now I don’t know what’s right or wrong. I was going to put new washed sand in hoping the rock and bio filters would have plenty of bacteria in them, and also put in about 50% new water. Hopefully this works