Transferring sand bed from a ~3 month old tank?

[Frogspon]

I know transferring a live sand bed is a tricky topic (not looking to rinse).. but would transferring some from a tank that's only about 3 months old be risky? Pretty light bioload.. There's only been 2 clownfish in it.

Just set a 40G breeder up but decided to upgrade the size.. not sure if it's worth the savings to try transferring ~20lbs or just start new.

 

[brandon429]

here's how that breaks down

you risk killing your tank, but not a lot.


with a rinse, you have zero risk, and a 3 month bed has nothing beneficial in it anyway, sure you don't want to rinse

we have a couple examples handy where everyone said moving old sand was safe and then bam, op loses all fish and we debate for pages if the sand caused it.

conversely, in the rinsing threads, there's no losses for fifty pages.

I assess your loss risk by skipping pre rinsing to be low at 5% risk

what you gain by moving the old sand is nothing, it doesn't help to keep it and its likely to fuel some uglies with all the mixing and new waste brought over + bright lights etc

but uglies are expected in new tanks as well, this w just boost them a little.

not wanting to rinse doesn't come from any form of reliable tank moves logged, its something people feel compelled to avoid but in the end its more harm than the safe way.

 

[mottomegl]

The wrasse looks like a mellenarus wrasse as for the tank if you have a new 90 you use it if your worried about leaks but these corner tanks are nice cause they are deep had one years ago but i would save the unused one as a quarantine tank also in my experience of moving tanks i have moved a lot tanks I always try to reuse as much water as possible especially in a short move but i would have at least minimum of 70 gallons of water made just in case but should be easy move not a lot of fish and doesn’t look like a tremendous amount of rock last time I moved a tank i used my fishing coolers cause they hold so much and they were 4 and 5 long but i found coolers work well or ask a local fish store for the styrofoam containers that fish get shipped in most stores are happy to give them away