Drilling an established tank

[Rubymoon286]

Hey all! One of my gifts to myself for Christmas is to hopefully go back and drill my ten gallon display (the system is a total of 50 gallons including sump and display refugium.) It's already established and I wanted to ask if I should just move everything to a bucket while I drill or if there's a particular way to go about it to maintain the cycle with minimal risk.

My plan right now is to use two five gallon buckets, and water from the display (plus some from the sump if needed) move rock to the buckets taking care for encrusted coral, loose coral that hasn't encrusted yet will go in a small egg crate rack in the sump I'll sift snails and such out of the sand into one of the buckets, and discard the sand. I currently don't have any fish in that tank, so that's one less thing to worry about. I have heaters that can go in the buckets, as well as air stones for gas exchange.

I plan to scrape the glass really well, and I will also have to remove paint from the back and repaint it to confirm the back isn't tempered before I drill. Does my plan seem pretty sound or is there anything I can do to improve my chances of not totally crashing the system? I didn't drill when I was setting it up because I was uncomfortable with the idea of it when I set this tank up. Now that I've done a few, I like how much more reliable the drilled tanks are compared to hob overflows.

Thanks in advanced!

 

[sunken3]

i have drilled acrylic on a live tank, but never glass.. acrylic floats so its easy to net off.. i would assume glass sinks and is finer dust.... also i would have a fear of it shattering while drilling.. otherwise??? maybe empty just in case?

 

[andrewkw]

10 gallon tanks are not tempered. If the tank is in anything less than perfect condition might I suggest you buy a new tank, drill that then transfer the livestock to that tank.

 

[polyppal]

10 gallon tanks are not tempered. If the tank is in anything less than perfect condition might I suggest you buy a new tank, drill that then transfer the livestock to that tank.

Yeah, id spend $20 on a new tank, if anything goes wrong with the wet one it'd be a disaster

 

[Rubymoon286]

Oh twist my arm a bit more!
I've been debating swapping out to a twenty anyway, but I wanted to try to make the ten work because it has interesting dimensions for a ten, but having the extra space that a twenty gives me means I'll have room for more coral