hospital tank?

[mytank90]

i just bought a 33 gallon tank to use as a hospital/new fish tank .do i need run any filter on tank?skimmer?.also what do you recemend to use for medication for new fish .also after fish survive in hospital tank do you dump everthing out and put new water in tank do get ride of anything that might be in it?

[DiverDude]

I've been looking at a small quarantine tank as well. From what I've seen, many medications will tell you to turn off your skimmer but leave any biological filtration running so I'm not planning on skimming this tank.

My plan is to make a fresh batch of salt water, fill the tank, treat the fish then dump the water and shut the tank down until I need it again. You should assume that the hospitalized specimen was sick (and is presumably now well) but the water is contaminated. I would never put that water in my display tank.

What I would likely do is when I'm ready to put the fish into the display tank, I'd drain part of the hospital tank, and discard the water and replace it with water from the display and then add new salt water to the display. This will acclimate the recovered fish and you do a partial water change at the same time !