taking out gravel

[reefrobber]

in my tank at the moment i have crushed coral that my old lfs sold me, i would like to switch it out with some southdown sand and ls. has any one done this before? and what did you do to take it out without getting any inverts? i have one damsel which i plan to give back to the fish store soon and i have about 25lbs of lr. thanks

 

[hariii2]

HEy, I am in the same boat. I started with crushed coral but now I want to switch to sand. I have been told that I will have better luck with Nitrates with sand. I was going to just take everything out of my tank into a bucket and then take out all the crushed coral and dump in the sand. I don't plan on getting live sand so I think that I will be OK doing it this way. That is just what I was planning on doing, I have VERY little experience with saltwater so don't go by that. I am looking for suggestions also.

 

[saltym3]

i used to have CC with a UGF. I had 2 fish but at the time no liverock. I just put my fish and inverts into my QT and cleaned out all the guck the UGF left behind in the tank before I put playsand and than livesand on top eventually adding the liverock. If you do a search you will find people do the swap the same day using buckets but I was not risking it. I had a quick cycle but I didnt mind it.

 

[jblabs]

Just completed my switch 2 weeks ago. I have a 110 with about 150 pounds of LR, many corals, and numerous crabs/snails/fish.
Set up 2 45 gal rubbermaid cont with a pump and heater, and started draining water from the 110 into them. Transfered LR and corals into them as the water level lowered. Got the fish as I could and acclimated them into a 20 gal frag tank I have.
Also caught snails and crabs as I went along, and threw them in the rubbermaids.
Cleaned out the gravel and added the base rock and rinsed southdown, then slowly added new and old SW out of the rubbermaids.
Losses? I couldn't tell you about crabs/snails, don't count them, but no losses obvious. Re-acclimated the fish to the 110 and lost none, and the corals look great. Had one fish that we could not find, it had hid in the LR, but as we were filling up the tank, POOF it popped out of a rock.
In all this took from 8 AM till 10 pm and then the fish were put back in the next evening. The southdown milkshake was gone the next morning. Later that week I innoculated the sand with sand from a buddies tank. Tons of bristles, spaghetti worms, etc.
I love the look of a DSB!

 

[droshi]

I just switched today, much happier...i made a post about it here.

 

[reefrobber]

thanks guys, i don't have a qt tank, but i have a home depot bucket, i won't have any fish so i think that should be fine for the lr and inverts