Tank upgrade

[billy joe ferguson]

Good day folks,

Here's the deal. Power use is killing me so I have decided to go down to one large tank instead of running 3 different tanks. I currently have 2, 125 Gallons and a 95 gallon wave tank. I was out at Custom Aquaruim's here in Wisconsin the other day picking up a H2O Overflow and looked at their reclaimed tanks from their customers tanks and bought a 180 gallon tank.
I plan on putting everything into the 180 over the next 7 days. I plan starting with fresh live sand and then moving everything from the other 3 tanks.
What I am looking for is some advise on how best to do this without crashing and loosing everything.

 

[Antics]

Using as much existing rock and water as possible is going to be the only way to mitigate crashing if you're wanting to do this relatively quickly instead of setting up the new 180 and gradually moving everything over slowly. I think you'll probably be fine if you have plenty of well established rock and water to use, but I'm also not sure how big the bioload of fish and coral you're trying to migrate is. Testing the water frequently and having something like Prime to combat ammonia is probably the safest bet.

I've never really thought of the cost of electricity creep from aquarium sprawl. I'd be interested to know if the savings is significant once you condense.

 

[billy joe ferguson]

1 Scorp Tang
1 Tommis Tang
1 Sailfin Tang
7 Green Chromis
2 Golden head jaw fish
20 to 30 Naz snails
1 Mandrin Goby
3 cleaner shrimp
6 crabs, either blue or red leg
and about 20 pices of coral. Some good size and frags of smaller sizes

This about most of Bioload stuff
I am using a 125 gallon sump and a 55 gallon Fuge

 

[Super Fly]

I would use as much of the pipes and equipments (powerhead, sump, skimmer, pump etc) from one of the established tanks on the new tank as they are full of beneficial bacteria. Use new sand with few cups of the old sand to help seed new tank with as much/all the rocks from the 3 tanks. With all this together, you'd have plenty of good bacteria so it would not cause any crash if used in the new tank. I would use new clean water though, as the old water from old tanks are just dirty water. Just make sure to rinse/clean off detritus and gunk from equipment prior to reusing