Purchasing a used Biocube 32 need moving advice

[R33FDr3amer]

I will be picking up my very first saltwater aquarium this Friday ;Joyful . The seller suggest I keep the sand and water, however, after doing research i'm seeing it's probably best to replace the sand with new? If I'm going to do this, is it really worth saving his water as well? I'm running into an issue on transporting the water. I may have to use storage totes and hope that the water doesn't spill out or get trash cans and try that. I'm trying to figure out what the best route would be. A little about the tank, there are no fish or corals. It does come with rock, sand, and algae (lol). It is still running. Seller took all corals and fish out as he upgraded to a larger tank. Just trying to get advice on how to move this and be successful. I don't want to use the sand/water/rock if it will potentially cause me hurtles later. I do have a ro/di 4 stage system on the way. It will be here tomo so I can start producing ro water.
A: Start from scratch, replace sand, use my own RO water, clean and scrub everything and only use the rock
B: reuse sellers water, replace sand with new, get cuc to take care of the algae
C: reuse sellers water and sand. Clean nothing and cuc to take care of the algae
D: insert your idea here....lol

Thank you in advance for any help! I did do some searching on my own first but I'm still unsure which route would be best. The attached image is what the tank currently looks like

 

[rmorris_14]

? Thief sand…. What happened

Their..... Lol fat fingers..always lots of typos in my messages.

 

[rmorris_14]

? Thief sand…. What happened

....says this item is temp unavailable. Lol.
Did u all buy it all up? Lol
D

It’s been on sale for a couple weeks so it might be sold out. I bought the life rock and they only sent me 5 out of the 20 lbs I ordered. So I wouldn’t recommend that. But people seem to have good luck getting the sand they ordered

 

[Impala67]

Their..... Lol fat fingers..always lots of typos in my messages.

Lol I understand that

 

[rmorris_14]

This my favorite thing I have purchased for the biocube thus far. I would highly recommend getting it if it works for you. Makes shutting stuff off and on so much easier. ADJ Products PC-100A AC POWER STRIP

 

[Dbichler]

If I were to start another used tank I would make sure to have made 2x the amount of rodi water and had it ready for tank as soon as it got home. One for the initial fill and another plain rodi water not salt yet but ready for end of cycle which on a used tank is usually days. Nothing worse then having the excitement of a new tank and not being able to fill it up right away. Most people forget how long rodi can take to make until you upgrade again and again and wait for it again.

 

[Naturalreef]

As mentioned above, take rock and sand out. Leave all stock equipment in the tank, fill it up and run for a few days to a week. Empty, fill up with fresh water to rinse x2 and enjoy a brand new looking tank.

 

[R33FDr3amer]

....says this item is temp unavailable. Lol.
Did u all buy it all up? Lol
D

it's all gone! lol I went ahead and bought https://www.petsmart.com/featured-b...a-aragalive-reef-sand-43627.html?cgid=5000550 before it sells out too ;Woot
@coralreefdefender i seen that same thing on a youtube channel where they suggested you not use old sand for that exact reason, which was what brought me to post here and ask for sure lol I've had some fun shopping online in preparation for my tank this weekend...woohoo! I ordered the citric acid as well. BRS had a good video on citric acid use!

 

[R33FDr3amer]

As mentioned above, take rock and sand out. Leave all stock equipment in the tank, fill it up and run for a few days to a week. Empty, fill up with fresh water to rinse x2 and enjoy a brand new looking tank.

I took your advice and I've had the tank running with citric acid since Friday. I have a question...this RO water sure takes awhile to make and my water has been running for 2 days....lol Is it possible to rinse the tank with tap water after the tank has been running in the citric acid bath for a week. After the tap water rinse, then add RO water for a 2nd rinse, then do a finale fill with RO/Salt?

 

[davidcalgary29]

I took your advice and I've had the tank running with citric acid since Friday. I have a question...this RO water sure takes awhile to make and my water has been running for 2 days....lol Is it possible to rinse the tank with tap water after the tank has been running in the citric acid bath for a week. After the tap water rinse, then add RO water for a 2nd rinse, then do a finale fill with RO/Salt?

Yes

 

[damsels are not mean]

Dump the water 100%... No reason to save it at all. Sand I'd rinse but up to you. The benefits of keeping old (especially if dirty) sand are dubious at best and I am not sure it will matter if you keep the rock. Most anything in the sand is also in the rock, good or bad. But there won't be as much crap built up in it. Depends on how the sand appears. If there's a bunch of dark "mud" under it when you disturb it I'd just rinse it.

 

[damsels are not mean]

I took your advice and I've had the tank running with citric acid since Friday. I have a question...this RO water sure takes awhile to make and my water has been running for 2 days....lol Is it possible to rinse the tank with tap water after the tank has been running in the citric acid bath for a week. After the tap water rinse, then add RO water for a 2nd rinse, then do a finale fill with RO/Salt?

Tap water is really not the boogeyman it seems on the forums, some people with low TDS tapwater don't even bother with a full RO/DI system at all. Most of the bad will be removed if you run carbon and if you're just rinsing there shouldn't be enough bad in the system in the first place to be an issue.

 

[R33FDr3amer]

Tap water is really not the boogeyman it seems on the forums, some people with low TDS tapwater don't even bother with a full RO/DI system at all. Most of the bad will be removed if you run carbon and if you're just rinsing there shouldn't be enough bad in the system in the first place to be an issue.

Thank you! You don't know how much this makes me happy to hear lol

 

[rmorris_14]

I agree with using regular water to rinse. Use the RO once you start mixing salt and adding to the tank to cycle.

 

[R33FDr3amer]

I agree with using regular water to rinse. Use the RO once you start mixing salt and adding to the tank to cycle.

Thank you! I ended up cleaning the rock too but the citric acid dissolved some of it. I had that separate from the tank in a tote. There is still a big chunk of it but I'm worried it might be ruined now and shouldnt use it? I didn't want to use it as it smelled REALLY bad Lfs suggested to put it with the tank while I clean it but I kept it in its own container and figured I would try it . Now I'm worried about putting it in the tank and causing havoc

 

[rmorris_14]

Thank you! I ended up cleaning the rock too but the citric acid dissolved some of it. I had that separate from the tank in a tote. There is still a big chunk of it but I'm worried it might be ruined now and shouldnt use it? I didn't want to use it as it smelled REALLY bad Lfs suggested to put it with the tank while I clean it but I kept it in its own container and figured I would try it . Now I'm worried about putting it in the tank and causing havoc

If you used citric acid on the rock... I wouldn’t use it. Bleach or vinegar might have been a better option if you wanted to clean it and didn’t care about killing the beneficial bacteria. If you aren’t attached to it, I wouldn’t use it now (since any benefit it brought is likely dead). I would think it might leach the citric acid back into the tank?

 

[R33FDr3amer]

If you used citric acid on the rock... I wouldn’t use it. Bleach or vinegar might have been a better option if you wanted to clean it and didn’t care about killing the beneficial bacteria. If you aren’t attached to it, I wouldn’t use it now (since any benefit it brought is likely dead). I would think it might leach the citric acid back into the tank?

No i'm not attached to it. I've ordered some rock to play around with while I wait on the tank to be clean and ready. I planned on trying to incorporate this rock somehow into my aquascape vision but if it's ruined then it is a lesson learned for the future ;Happy It's a little chunkier than what my "vision" is for the tank but it is still a nice shape to work with. However, not at the expense of my soon to be precious water balance lol

 

[Airwolf]

This my favorite thing I have purchased for the biocube thus far. I would highly recommend getting it if it works for you. Makes shutting stuff off and on so much easier. ADJ Products PC-100A AC POWER STRIP

@rmorris_14 can you post a picture of how you mounted this? The measurements of the power bar appear to be close to the width of the cabinet outside to outside. Looking at my cabinet, it appears you will have to have the mounting tabs behind where the door swings? Is there enough clearance?

 

[rmorris_14]

@rmorris_14 can you post a picture of how you mounted this? The measurements of the power bar appear to be close to the width of the cabinet outside to outside. Looking at my cabinet, it appears you will have to have the mounting tabs behind where the door swings? Is there enough clearance?

Yeah I will show you a picture when I get home tonight. You are correct, we had to put the tabs behind the doors. It is definitely tight! So we took the doors off, installed the power bar and put them back on. Depending on your doors to your cabinet and how they were installed/ manufactured, can vary your success. Our right door worked no problem. The left door however, was snagging against the top installation screw. because the hinge was installed just a little be closer. we ended up leaving the top screw out of the top of the side of the power bar. It is stable and gave the door enough room to operate properly. You will have to use flat headed screws

NOW I will say that last Friday, My husband was cleaning the doors and that particular screw (Top left) on the door ripped out. we currently have the door sitting next to the cabinet until we can get a wider screw with a flat head. However, I think the door coming off was a combination of him being too rough (although he says he cant remember-hahaha) and we had kind of stripped the hole, when were were fiddling with the power bar install.

Other options:
1. would be to mount the power bar under the middle shelf. I think the clearance in this area would be more than enough because the door mounting brackets are not right there as well.
2. I think I have seen someone else who bent the mounting tabs on the power bar forward and then installed the power bar with the taps on the inside of the cabinet. I'm not 100 percent on this and it didn't seem appealing as a solution since we got ours to work without doing that.

If you have Amazon Prime, you can always return it if it doesn't end up working with your doors.

I'll send the photos tonight after work

 

[rmorris_14]

Here are some photos and a short video showing the door functions. Let me know if you need any from different angles.. the strip is sized just right the mounting holes pretty much line up in the middle of the edge on either side. (as long as you go straight back)

Biocube door function with power strip

youtube.com

 

[rmorris_14]

If I had to do it all over again I might have gone in the middle of the cabinet to avoid putting both hard war in the same vicinity... but I liked the way it looked at the top better.