How to clean and take down aquarium

So i am ready to take down and clean out my 36 gallon to sell. How do you guys take down your tanks? it is pretty gnarly right now, so i was looking for an easy way to clean it out and store it. What's the best way to remove the crushed coral, etc?

 

bump

 

Oh man, this is a tough one. When I moved last year in May, I decided to upgrade my tank. So I essentially broke down my old tank and moved almost everything into the new tank.

I doubt I did it the best way possible but I'll give you what I did and what I've learned.

The day of breaking it down I removed 50% of the water, turned off the equip, and caught all the fish/inverts obviously. Assuming you have all that taken care of, after I drained the tank down to the substrate leaving the substrate wet which was crushed coral and gravel. I began taking the substrate with a kitty litter scooper of sort and putting it in a bucket. I made one live sand, one dead sand bucket and put the live sand immediately in the new tank. I left the dead sand bucket to basically dry up. I removed as much substrate as possible that way.I then moved the tank outside on a tarp and tipped the tank, sprayed it with a house and pushed the remaining substrate out onto the tarp to help toss the substrate into my compost.

Depending how much stuff you want to remove from the walls too, it can be a tough job from here. I had an acrylic tank so I couldn't remove the algae and barnacle things as easy with a glass tank imo. So I scraped as much as I could with the scraper then filled the tank up with water and a small amount of bleach. Washed it around and dumped it out. Scraped some more and then left it to dry in the sun. I got most of it, but there were some areas left. Like I said, there probably is a better way, but this is a way.

 

I did it basically how smackrock did.

I started by turning off any equipment I had. If I had any corals, i would have removed them first. Once the equipment was turned off, I took out all the rock, making it much easier to scoop out the fish.

For the substrate, I used my hands to scoop up the crushed coral sand bed, you could use a scoop, like above, but I didn't have on at the time. I saved a handful of it to seed my new sandbed when I moved. I removed as much cc as I could, until it was just a few small pieces and some water.

I set the tank in the grass, on it's side. I used the garden hose to sray out any excess cc/dirty water. I rinsed it several times. With all the substrate gone, it was onto the glass cleaning. For this, I used a glass scrubber, a mag-float, and a razor blade to scrape off all the coraline algae I had on the glass. Scape away at the glass and let it screech until you kill your ears.

When that was done, I let the tank soak for about a half-hour with 50/50 distilled white vinegar water solution. This is sterile. Do not use apple-cider vinegar. Let set(each side) for a half-hour. You can use the same mix...just turn the tank.

When it looked clean enough for me, I rinsed it once more and let it dry for a few hours then I put I away.