I just moved from Portland, OR to Boise, ID in October, about 7 hour drive. I ignored my wife's request to sell all the livestock before moving. I spent too much time collecting the corals so I decided to try to take them with me. It was a 90 gallon tank and about 150 lbs of live rock. Here is my experience.
Most of my corals are SPS. I got bags from the LFS and bagged all
SPS corals and placed them in coolers. I collected a bunch of empty IO salt buckets. I liked the IO buckets because the seemed to seal very good with the screw on lid. I placed all the rock and the few
soft corals that I had in buckets. I only kept two fish, sixline, clown. They each went into a bucket. The clown in the same bucket as its hosting xenia.
I did not use heaters or air during the move. I was mostly worried about spilling water so I wanted the buckets sealed well and did not want to worry about running power. Kept the corals and some of the buckets of rock in the truck cab. Kept the temp in cab about 70 during the trip.
When I got to the destination put all livestock and some rock in a smaller 40 - 50 gallon tank. I reused the water that everything shipped in plus about 10% new water. Set up the skimmer and some pumps for flow. The water temp was about 70 when I arrived. Put in a small heater so that I could raise the temp slowly over night.
I was pretty surprised how well everything did. Only lost like one or two corals, and they were not looking too good before the move. I was told that if I kept the temp close to 70 that the corals would be fine. I think they were right.
Theron
