Moving my sand to a new tank

hello, I have a 75 gallon fish tank, and i want to move it to my 150 gallon tank. What is the best way to move the sand and the fish to the new tank?

 

i will stick with this thread. i am trying to figure out the same question. i want to switch from my 55 to 75. good luck with your transfer, bwood84.

 

do not move sand to a new tank. get all new cheap and clean dry sand.

at most, put like a cup of sand from the old tank to the new to seed it.

 

maybe syphon it out?

 

First, how deep is your current sand bed? If its over an inch you need to be aware that there is waste that is trapped deep underneath (nitrite) and when you disturb this you are going to release all these toxin to the water. So before you remove your sand get all your livestock,corals, and rock out of there and if you are transferring some of your tank water get as much as you want out of there, BUT leave 5-6in of water in the tank as this will be needed (keep reading ).
You want to be on the safe when transferring your sand as you want to limit the disruption of the established CUC and pods burrowed within. Not all are going to make the transfer but if you can get a good amount over this can only help.

Here is what I did when i did a tank change and transferred my sand (2.5in deep sand bed):

I set aside 2 buckets. 1 for the top .25-.5in of sand ONLY, and 1 bucket for the sand that is deeper (below .5in"). The goal here is to separate your top CUC and other bio from the bottom half that is going to release toxins and probably kill them off. So siphon out the top layer of sand into 1 or 2 buckets and make sure there is some water in there to keep the bio alive (you also dont want there to be too deep of a sand bed in these buckets).

So you finished collecting the top layer of sand, now for the bottom half. With this sand i would recommend just scooping it out into a bucket as it may be easier. This half of the sand you are NOT going to want to put in your new tank without first draining all the water from that bucket into the sink - all that water is filled with toxins and cant be used for your new tank. With the remainder of the sand in that bucket run it through water to flush out any waste. RO is probably best but i dont think tap will do much harm as you are NOT going to be putting this water into your tank anyways - this water is just to rinse the sand getting rid of as much waste as possible, so the more you rinse it the better.

When you are done rinsing and have drained the water from the bucket you want to add this sand to the tank FIRST so it is going to be the BOTTOM layer just as in your last tank. After that you add the sand from the first bucket so it is the TOP layer and your CUC and pods wont be berried.

Your tank is still going to go through a cycle as there is going to be some die off but it wont be any different than if you added new sand, only now you have the benefit of still having pods, and a CUC.

Hope this helps! I dont know how clear i was :/

 

Why, no matter what your going to have a cycle so why not use the old sand. I siphoned the sand out into buckets along with water. when the buckets got close to full I dumped the water on the top out along with most of the really nasty stuff that was in it.

After taking all but a small amount of sand out of the old tank I added new sand to the tank and filled with water and ran a Canister filter with a pleated filter for a day or so which cleared up the water and added my aquascaping.

After a normal cycle time my tanks was fine, the secret is it to make sure to dump off as much crap as you can before putting it into your tank. Oh yeah the tank I took the sand out of had been set up for 3 years.

 

first of all thanks for the responses.

anyone know where you can buy arognite sand that isn't seeded? i tried lowes and they don't have that type of sand.

What i want to do is let the new sand cycle in the tank and when it comes time to move my livestock to the new tank, i want to add some of my old sand to the new tank. i don't know what i should do with the fish while i'm waiting for the sand to settle in the new tank. i really don't want to toss my old sand away because it's been setup for over 4 years. let me know what you think. thanks again!