For what it's worth this is what I did when I moved my fish room from
Chicago to Michigan (about a 5 hour drive), five years ago. My room in
Chicago held 60+ tanks ranging in size from 10's to 50's, with several
larger tanks (55's to 135's) scattered in the rest off the house. I
ruthlessly sold off everything that I felt I could replace. This reduced
the total amount of tanks with fish in them to about 10.
Staring a month before the actual move I moved empty tanks to the new house
and set them up with water, heaters, lights, and an airstone to keep the
water from becoming stagnant. I use sponge filters exclusively in my fish
room, so when it came time to start moving fish, each weekend I took
several boxes of bagged up fish and cycled sponge filters from their tanks
along with. Once at the new house the fish and filters went into the new
tanks and I don't think I lost a single fish from the move.
The fish room did not come till after the move and I had time to rebuild
it. This I actually did by building the room around the tanks. Some how
it ended up bigger, now 100+ tanks, but I guess that's the way it works.
In a previous move, this time from Dallas to Chicago, I only moved with me
the fish I could fit in five gallon pails. We rented a station wagon, they
hadn't invented mini-vans yet, filled it up with as many 5 gallon pails of
water it could hold, put battery operated airpumps on the buckets, and
drove straight through, about 1100 miles. In retrospect if I had this to
do over, I should have just bagged the fish and sponge filters, as they can
usually go a couple of days in a bag and just started with new water once
we got there. As a footnote I now own a mini-van which made the move from
Chicago to Michigan possible.
IMHO, I could start cycling sponge filters, or the bio-wheel type of
outside filters (Marineland makes several excellent models) so you have an
active biological filter going right from the start. Get these going at
least a month in advance as it takes some time for the bacteria to grow and
populate the media. Also, I would be very, very, selective on what you try
to move as it would be far better to successfully move a few prized
specimens than to try to move everything and loose it all.
At 07:32 PM 2/19/98 -0500, you wrote:
>Has anyone moved there entire fish room before? If yes can you provide me
>the planning i need to think about.
>
>
>Thanks
>Larry
>
Phil Benes
phil at mail.netquest.com
Michigan Cichlid Association http://www.ole.net/mca/