I started off by draining the water from the sump into a couple 5 gallon buckets. i put the cheato and red kelp into one of the buckets, then put all my corals into another bucket. The clams went into a third bucket and finally the rock into a fourth. A couple of the smaller pieces of LR (baseball-sized) I left in the tank along with the sand and about 2" of water. My YWG stayed in the tank too along with the clean-up crew. My dad and I moved the tank into my trunk with a couple of the buckets, the emptied sump, stand, and remaining buckets went into my dads truck.
When I got to the new place, I just set the tanks back up, filled the main display tank with the old water, put the rock back into the tank, added all new water to the sump (which is about 15 gallons of water...half of the total volume of my system... but the old and new water were the same temp and salinity), and finally added the corals into the main display. the water temp was about 76.5, so I set the heater to about 78 to avoid a large rise in temp.
The key i think is to try to avoid disturbing the sand bed if at all possible. In your case though, i think this would be rather hard to do without putting too much stress on the glass when you move your tank. you will definitely want to by several 5 gallon buckets WITH lids at HD for about $4 each...
HTH, feel free to ask any ??? as I am sure I left something out.
Jesse
