Cycle or no to cycle a used tank

[mfs1855]

Hope this is the right thread for this question.

I'm picking up a 60 gallon cube from someone I met. Nice guy (non member) but he seems to have been winging the maintenance of the tank. While watching him do a water change there was a tremendous amount of cyano floating in the tank.

Does it make sense to take the tank with the water and set it back up at my place 'without' re-cycling it, or find a home for the 7 fish and 2 anemones while I bleach, vinegar and generally clean the tank, sump, etc.?

He doesn't have any coral in the tank, just the fish, anemones and a small cleanup crew.

itis a 24" x 24" x 24" cube with 40 lbs of sand and what looks like 60 lbs of live rock. There is a sump with a reactor and skimmer.

I'm obviously new to the hobby so any help will be welcome.

Thanks for reading my post.

Matt

 

[albano]

Sounds like you should use most of the old water to rinse the rock and sand then fill the rest of the tank with new SW and add everything back...
I'd try to avoid cleaning anything with bleach, most times algae is easy to clean off equipment.

 

[evoIX_Reefer]

cyano - red slime?

Do you know if he was using an RO/DI? 0tds? His rocks will probably have phos issues so I'd possibly think about getting new rock and i prefer not to reuse sand unless absolutely necessary or depending on age of the tank/sand.

 

[BAD FISH]

def. change 75%-90% of the water and rinse and scrub the rock and get all the ditrus out of the rock and syphon out all the sand and that's quite a lot of fish I would look for some new homes for some of them

 

[mfs1855]

he has a RO/DI setup but I couldn't tell you how clean the filters are or what his TDS count it.

The tank is 2 years old. Does that qualify for getting new sand? I assume if I get new live sand, it will cycle the tank?

 

[albano]

Try to get a TDS meter so that you know how good the rodi is... You should have over 40g of old SW to wash all the LR and sand, no need to replace rock and sand.

 

[mfs1855]

Thanks for all the advice!

When you say wash all the LR, do you mean actually scrub it, or agitate it in the old water?

 

[albano]

Depends on if it needs to be scrubbed...cyano should almost float off the rock just by picking it up from the tank water

 

[evoIX_Reefer]

Surprised you would insist on reusing old sand without telling him to atleast rinsing it out well. A lot of ditirius gets caught up and will cause a nice spike if it is disturbed pretty good on the move.

Either way, you can reuse the sand but I personally would suggest to clean out the sand very good especially if it's a dsb and it's going to be disturbed.

 

[mfs1855]

It was suggested to me to scoop out the top half of the sand and discard it (this being the part with the most ditirius). Then when setting up at the new location. Put the remaining old sand down and then add new live sand on top of it. Supposedly this with create a cycle that last only a few days and not harm the fish or anemone (no coral in the tank at this point.)

 

[Dan_P]

In thinking about how to minimally disturb the tank inhabitants, here is a potential protocol to use.

Reuse half the water in setting up the tank
Use the other half to swish and rinse the rocks

Thinking about reusing the substrate is trickier. A good portion of the tank's biological filter could reside here. Unfortunately, there could be waste accumulation as well. You could rinse it well with old tank water and reuse it. If it is a deep sand bed, I am punting on giving advice.

If you select skipping cycling, monitor ammonia for a few weeks to avoid surprises.

If this post dries up without producing sufficient guidance on reusing the old sand, try posting again on just "reusing old substrate".

Good luck!

 

[mfs1855]

Good point. I was thinking though, do I really need to put the old sand back in at all? Couldn't I simply put the old live rocks in with no sand, wait until I'm stable again and then add dry non-live sand at some point in the future? There are six very small fish in the tank and 60 lbs of live rock.

 

[mfs1855]

To close out this thread... I moved the tank and used all new sand and seeded it with 2 cups of the old sand. In the end, there was a mini cycle which only lasted 2-3 days with no dye off of the fish, anemones or coral.

Thanks everyone for the advice.