The 180 "Big Move" saga....

[Airmotive]

Perhaps a few of you remember a thread I started a couple of weeks ago asking for advice on moving an established 180 reef (lightly stocked) 850 miles.

Well....the Big Move is about 75% complete. Some disasters were avoided (thaks Scott Z.!!), some were unavoidable, and some we ran smack into like a plate glass door. So, as I sit here waiting for my morning coffee to take effect, I'll share some of what I learned in the past 48 hours. There will be more, along with color glossy photos with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining....

Stupid mistakes I made:
1. Failure to scout the tank's new location...namely, under the floor. A few hours before leaving for FL to pick the tank up, I decided to have a peek under the house....a single joist ain't gonna hold a 2000lb tank. (Found a new location that positions the tank ACROSS five joists which are in turn supported by a 6x6 cross member).

2. Drove through South Carolina....namely, I-95. I have driven in third world countries that maintain their roads in better condition... that's no exageration. Much damage was done, which I will detail later. (In spite of slowing to 35 MPH....on an INTERSTATE!!). (tank arrived intact though).

Well...Home Depot is about to open, so I have to cut this short. Eventually I hope to have a decent post here which will serve as a reference for the poor S.O.B. faced with moving a large tank, long distances, with live critters.

Till next time...
JJ

[Poseidon]

Can't wait to hear the rest JJ!! I have moved tanks a couple times now, but never that far!!

[Airmotive]

Okay...here we are one full week into reef ownership. After an 850 mile move that bordered on disasterous, things came together rather well. Here is the system as it currently stands:

180 gallon AGA, single overflow with 2X drilled bottom.
25 gallon sump containing nothing but a Euro Reef skimmer and two Otto 300W heaters. (yes, the sump is tiny...wondering if it's an issue)
Quiet One return pump.
Lighting is by a pair of Tek Light T5 fixtures, each containing 6 X 36" (39 watt) bulbs. The light from these is simply awesome. You can see our living room windows glowing from a quarter mile up the road....with the blinds closed! Our house looks possessed.
3"-4" of aragonite sand and a few hundred pounds of live rock.

We started the move with one colony of mushrooms....which was smashed into three pieces in the move (see above-mentioned South Carolina highway conditions). The 'shrooms looked horrible, torn and tattered. I was ready to scrape the remains off the rocks and be done with it. We let them be...and they're thriving! (albeit now in three seperate locations in the tank) One mushroom has more than doubled in size this week alone (going from 2.5" to 6"...I'm hoping to see a split soon....but I'm plenty happy that they're simply alive).

It seems every other rock has Zoanthids popping up out of nowhere. One or two here...a big colony there. All have the same colorization though...

One little colony of star polyps....under a rock. Didn't notice them until after we got the landscaping done. They kept their heads down for a couple of days but are now making their presence known. It will be interesting to see if they can adapt to life in the shade, or perhaps move to an area of more direct lighting.

A single cleaner shrimp is doing well.

Had a single aptasia show up...a little lemon juice in a syringe....works great.

One big, nasty looking bristle worm found in the rock (would have made excellent bass bait).

As for critters with backbones.... Maited pair of False perculas, a coral beauty, a yellow assessor, and a magenta dottyback.

Operations:
This week we've logged ammonia concentrations go from 0, up to .5ppm and back to zero. Nitrites and nitrates have remained undetectable. Phosphate was at 0.5 ppm (probably from the tap water we had to use to get the tank up and running in a timely manner). Added a bag of PhosZorb, which has knocked it down to 0.1ppm. Ca is at 500ppm....not that it matters that much right now. SG is 1.023.

Well, there's the introduction to this long, as of yet unwritten saga. Attached is one so-so pic. (the Uber-shroom is high up on the rocks on the left side) Pics of the move will follow.

Eventually, we'll have an educational thread here...hopefully...

[orion25]

From someone who used to live in NC on I95.......... You were risking your life doing 35mph on I95. I made Many trips from Lumberton, NC to Savannah, GA to see my Girlfriend (now Wife) and I would have been Run Over doing less than 75 mph. I usually did between 80 and 90. And that was just to keep up with Traffic.


Anyway, I hope your move is successful and all goes well.

[Airmotive]

Okay, here we go…this may get a little long. But we’ve had the tank set up for a week and a half now; I think I have pretty well flushed out all the mistakes I’ve made as well as the moments of brilliance (as few as they were). So, with out further adieu, here’s my take on how to move a large reef a long distance. (180 gallons/ 850 miles)

• (pic 1) Don’t skimp on your hauling capacity. In my case, an F-250 towing a horse trailer. I was considering just using the truck (a long bed). In hindsight, there’s no way the tank would have survived the trip. I would have had to store a great deal of equipment IN the tank for transport. The tank would have been destroyed. This is where renting a small moving truck or a U-Haul trailer is definitely in order. The horse trailer is especially nice because the walls are padded and there are no sharp or protruding edges. Those are the things that crack glass.
• (pic 2) Hay Bales!! I had a few old bales left over in the trailer. I credit these with keeping the tank in one piece while transiting the moonscape South Carolinians call I-95. They went under and beside the tank (which rode in the trailer). At the end of the trip, the bales were half their original height. In other words, the absorbed a LOT of energy…giving their lives so that my aquarium could live. Hay can be bought for a few bucks a bale and is easily disposed of after the move. (Unlike my original plan of using old tires to cushion the tank).
• MOVE THE WATER, TOO! Here’s how… I found a local pickled pepper importer (no, seriously!). They import peppers and olives from Greece in 50 gallon, food-grade, resealable, plastic barrels. I got four of them. One stayed here at home and was filled with seawater and preheated. The other three came with me. I originally was looking at trash cans to move the water,,,,bad deal. They weren’t strong enough, weren’t sealable and were God-awful expensive. The barrels cost me a CB radio that I traded to the guy on the loading dock.
• (pic 3) You WILL need a pond pump! (or some other high capacity, submersible pump). A pump, coupled with 50ft of new garden hose made life grand when it came time to move the water from tank to barrels and back to tank. Five gallons buckets are fine for moving your 55 gallon tank. But for a big tank, the ensuing mess would be a nightmare. Besides, you’ll soon wonder how you ever got along without it. I now keep my makeup and water change water in the basement (in a barrel, of course) and simply pump whatever water I need to the tank. With God as my witness, I’ll never lug another five-gallon bucket again!
• Move the livestock in the 50 gallon barrels. EVERY fish and invert I moved in a separate cooler with filtration and heating was destroyed. The death toll makes me weep….mated pairs of yellow-strip maroon clowns and tomato clowns, six-line wrasse, sunrise dottyback…argh. The battering the mushrooms took seemed to make them stronger, however. One big mistake I got away with was not heating the barrels. I thought (mistakenly) that there was enough water mass to maintain a steady temperature. Upon arriving in Virginia, the water was quite cold to the touch. The coral beauty was almost white and the mated pair of perculas were very sluggish. They survived a gentle warming and are alive and well today along with the yellow assessor and orchid dottyback.
• Digital camera….if you don’t have one, get one. Take pictures of all the plumbing and wiring before it’s broken down; you’ll be glad you did when you’re trying to put it all back together at one in the morning after driving all night.
• (pic 6) Don’t count on good weather. Remember, if you’re moving a long way, chances are you’ll hit rain at some point. One more reason to use a covered trailer.

8. (pic 7) Last but certainly not least…..don’t park your trailer on top of a fire ant hill!! It can really complicate the entire moving process.

Hope these little tidbits are of use.
Blue Skies
JJ

[Reefland]

Thanks for sharing your experiences, I am sure it will be useful to someone down the road.

Scott Z.