Will do Tom. Thanks everyone for the input. I'm pretty sad about the condition of the 26 But lessons learned. I do believe I may incorporate cleaning my sand bed once in a while.
Every time I do water changes, I siphon out the gravel in my 180.
I did that in my 75 gallon, but as Tom can attest from helping me a couple weeks ago, there was a spot we found that was so anaerobic that it had black gunk in it. It was 10 years worth of stuff. Now the drilled 75 is bare bottom.
The new tank after a week or so had some nitrates but only about 2 or 3.
Lights are not really needed to cycle a tank. I would suggest you do cycle the tank with a enzyme product that also encourages an ammonia spike. I used enzyme 9 from Marcos rocks worked awesome !