Glad people are learning and hopefully Qting too!
Its really not very hard. Its kind of the sad how many fish die because people refuse to QT. I have never lost a new fish in QT...ever. I have lost them in QT once they are already sick though. Its so easy to avoid them getting sick in the first place. Choose healthy looking, strong fish from the store and then QT them to make sure they stay healthy and strong.
To really be sure your safe, you really should set up a new tank with your LR, inverts, and corals first and wait 6 weeks until you add any fish. That way any ich living on corals, inverts, LR, ect. dies off. Then add only QT'd fish, inverts, corals, LR, macro algae, ect. ect. to your system. My brother does this and I have never heard of him ever having any disease in his tanks in about 8 years now. He is WAY more patient than me though
But it pays off in the end.
Im setting up 3 QT tanks now and all are set up a little different because the fish all have different needs. All are being treated with hyposalinity though.
QT#1 is a 40G rubbermaid for my puffers. This one needs good filtration because the load of these guys on a 40G will be heavy. So I have a cycled sponge from my sump ready to go along with a bag of carbon from my sump...both will have a decent amount of bacteria to keep their new home somewhat cycled. Im using a canister filter on this set up. Weekly water changes and Amquel will be needed as well. There is PVC for them to hide in.
QT#2 is another 40G rubbermaid set up basically the same but with a HOB filter instead of a canister. This one will have 5 medium sized fish and be fed every 2nd day, so the bio load will not be too crazy. In this QT though I have my goby who needs sand. So I have a bit of new dry sand and even some old dry and clean LR. This needs to be clean and dried out for a long time so that your not getting a bunch of die off and creating a big cycle. Don't use sand or LR from your display if you pan on doing hypo...it will die off slowly. But a QT should not have either of these things anyways unless its needed.
QT#3 is a 10G tank for a few of the smaller fish I have like my hawk.
I am also going to set up one more rubbermaid QT for 2 new fish I had planned on adding at some point in the future. They are the last 2 fish I plan on adding and I think I will QT them now while I have "tanks" all over the place anyways. That way they can go in the tank with the others and I can take down all the QT's.
Im not sure about others here but I continue to "feed" the display tank lightly while its fallow just to keep the bacteria colonies going. Not enough food to notice an ammonia spike or anything but enough to keep all my levels where they usually are. The one other time I had a fallow tank I was not feeding at first and I noticed that my corals started to look bad. I started feeding and they looked great again...this kind of goes more for softies though I think.
Anyways...hopefully there will be no loses due to my stupidity!