The big project

[Matthewdmueller]

OK fellow reeftalkers I need a little advice! Here is the situation. I want to move my 120 from one side of my living room to the other. At the same time I want to set up a new stand, and I want to rehang my lights someway other than from the ceiling. This big move is caused because I am tired of not having acess to the equipment that is under my tank now and I want to keep the tank about 2 foot off the wall so that I can set up a kind of tank room behind it. I've got all of that figured out but what I need some advice in is what is the best way to go about moving the fish, coral, rock, sand, ect. Right now I am thinking about using one of those kiddie pools to hold all of the fish corals and rock. A couple of buckets to hold the sand. I figure I can drop all of my powerheads into the kiddie pool to keep everything moving around as well as the skimmer. That should hold everything for the duration of the move, but where do I get one of those pools? The only ones that I have seen are the fancy blow up kind or they have crazy slides and stuff all over them. I just need a plain round plastic kiddie pool that can hold some serious gallons of water. Anyway if anyone has any sort of advice or recommendations on this topic I will take it. Thanks

[brody98]

I did the same thing you’re talking about when I moved my tank. The plastic kid pools you can get at wal-mart and toys r us but this time of year you might have to look real hard and hope someone has a few in "the back room" I’m not sure how warm it stays in FL during winter but around here they start getting rid of the pools and stuff in late July, the only reason I know that is my wife has worked at toys r us for almost 20 yrs and knows when they are trying to get rid of stuff and gets things for our kids ridiculously cheap. Another place to try is farm supply stores (if there are any around).

[Matthewdmueller]

Ah farm suppy, thats a good idea, like a water troff thing. That would work well and I think that I can find another use for that after everything is over with. I was thinking that I would have to take the kiddie pool back and return it after I was done because there is no where for me to put it in my apartment and we have a pool. Thanks for the help

[brody98]

Hey no problem hope it goes smooth for you

[Matthewdmueller]

Well today is friday, day 4 of the project. I think that I will be done tonight if I work all night. Its going to be awsome when it is all done though. I will post some pics as soon as I get it all nailed down.

[brody98]

Cool, run into any snags in the plans yet?

[Matthewdmueller]

Well I'm still working out the bugs. Seems the 2 Quiet one pumps that I am using are pushing to many GPH and I am trying to get the pumps and the overflows to work right. Noise is also another new issue. The drain from my refugium into my equipment tank is making a constant sucking noise. I'm trying multiple configurations to try to quiet that down before I build a silencer for it. I also never really figured out my topoff setup and so its sticking out in the middle of the floor right now. The stange thing is that all of my blue chromis died, but nothing else so far that I can tell. I figured if anything wasn't going to make it it would have been the tangs. I just arranged the rock and most of the inhabitants are still hiding alot so maybe tomorrow I will be able to get a more official head count, that is if the storm doesn't knock out my power. If that happens all I can do is try my best to keep everything alive, but with the stress they have been through already that might be difficult. Well enough chit chat, back to work, that noise isn't going away on it own!

[brody98]

It's a huge job I feel for you, let me know how it turns out.

[Matthewdmueller]

Well I think that I am finished with it now. I just got the pH back up to 8.2 yesterday. I don't know what happened but when I checked my water a couple of days ago the pH was all the way down to 7.8 or maybe even a little lower. The crazy thing was that when I moved my tank I only used about 25gal of new water. I don't know why it droped so low. I did add about 80lbs of live sand that I took from the beach. That might have been what caused it. There was a lot of detrius to deal with as well. Anyway all of my corals have started to open up and the fish are starting to come out of hidding. All but my xenias which is wierd because I thought that they were indestructable. They have been closed up tight since the move and I am worried that they might not open and die, which would suck becuase they were growing like wildfire and looked super. I'll post some pics when I get some.

[brody98]

Probably the ph drop that caused them to stay shut; I can’t get rid of mine. If you had an extended period of darkness "lights off" that might of had an effect on the ph also. Yeah let’s see some pics.

[Matthewdmueller]

OK looks like I need some help here. All of my fish but the 2 hippo tangs are dead. My lawnmower blenny died yesterday and the tangs aren't looking to hot today. I don't know what the problem is, I can't figure it out. My pH is at 8.2 and steady, 0 nirate, 0 nitrite, 0 ammonia, temp is steady between 79 and 81. My hardness is a little high but not to bad. I took my water to the LFS and he tested it and said that it looks good. He said that the only thing that he could think the problem might be is some sort of toxin or poison in the water. I've been changing 15gal of water a day but now I'm down to just 2 fish. It's horrible! All of the hermits and snails seem to be fine. All of my coral except for the xenia seems fine, but the xenia seems like its finally starting to come around. I just don't know. With the water changes I have changed all of the water at least once. I have even tested the water that I am using for the water changes and everything there looks great so I know its not my RO/DI. I put carbon in about a week ago to see if that helped but I guess not. Everything seems to be working fine, my fish just turn up dead, and they don't look like they are traumatized or anything, just dead like one second they were swimming along and then just died. I don't know any help would be great, Thanks

[brody98]

Do you have a ground probe in the tank or sump? there might be some stray voltage leaking out of something.

[Matthewdmueller]

Yeah all of my tanks are grounded via a ground probe in the equipment sump. I thought that that might be a problem as well and double checked that out and even tested the water with a meter. No electricity in there, and there isn't much equipment in the water anyway, only a couple of powerheads and a heater that is never on, every other pump is external now. Woke up this morning with a bad feeling and walked out to find one of the return pumps locked up and my sump overflowing. I got there just in time, only a few gallons was spilled. The weird thing was that I was dreaming about it, woke up, and was like "hum, something is wrong, I can feel it." Sure enough, kookie!

[brody98]

Wow that's weird. I have had something kind of similar happen a couple of years ago. I seen a couple of very small (1/8 inch) white things floating in the tank so I got them out to see that it was plastic but it didn’t really hit me where it came from. I went back up stairs for a few minutes and then came back down stairs to see the water about 1/16th of an inch from overflowing my sump. Turns out I only had two of the five fins left on my return pump, man that really would have sucked if I wouldn’t have been home. I wouldn’t think it was some kind of delayed reaction to the stress from moving things but you never know.

[Matthewdmueller]

Here are some of the pics that I have been promising. I don't really feel that they do it the justice it deserves. I am very happy with the set up as far as the floor plan / viewing side turned out. I am not happy however about the tech diffs that I have been going through. I'm going to try and post these in my gallery as well as one of my refugium so look there for some more.

[brody98]

Do you have one side open to get behind it or is there a door? Looks cool.

[Matthewdmueller]

There is a heavy curtain covering the way to behind the tank right now. I would like to put in a door or something but since I live in an apartment that might be a little too much.

[XeniaKiller]

When I moved my 75g I used at 50 gal Rubbermaid Garbage can for my live rock and used the tank water to keep it wet. It only took an hour or so to move everything, so I put my corals and fish in seperate buckets so they wouldn't kill each other from being in close quarters. It worked out well for me. Good luck.

[Matthewdmueller]

Yeah I ended up using 1-30gal trash can 2-45gal buckets a slew of 5gal buckets and 4 smaller fish tanks to do the move. It was a real mess. All in all the whole move took me about 8 hours. Maybe even more than that actually when I think about it.

[brody98]

That's a pretty cool set up for an apartment.

[Matthewdmueller]

Thanks brody, I like it, my girlfriend likes it, all of my guests like it, everyone like it. Even the pizza man made a comment about it the other night. I just hope that I can get it all locked down so that I can start to put fish in it again soon. Thanks for the compliment though!

[brody98]

Just think what you could do with a house. Winter is coming on here in the Midwest and I don’t want to move that time of year but in the spring I will hopefully be moving my last time, man I can’t wait to get my tank stuff set up the way I really want it. If all goes the way I want my current tank will be my new sump ;-)

[mbeach66]

pics look good. I've always wanted to put make an Aquarium in a wall. I think when i move i'm going to build a house around an aquarium rather then try to build an aquarium around a house.

[brody98]

That would be cool to have enough money to do something like that!

[mbeach66]

Yea thats another thing that would infringe on my plans. I'm hoping that the next Aquarium i build, i will have for a long time. That will make it seem like less of a money crisis.

[brody98]

I'm hoping when I move to get a 180G and set it into a wall with a closet or small room behind it, I hate moving tanks bigger than 30g.

[Matthewdmueller]

That is one thing that I wish was an option when I set this new one up. I wish I was upgrading to a new bigger tank. It would have been nice to take my time in moving everything and doing some testing and troubleshooting before any livestock was involved. Plus it would have been a bigger tank which is always nice:)

[brody98]

Yeah nothing beats having room to do what you want.