Plans to rid ich, need advice

[daniella3d]

Your QT was connected to the main tank? how can water from the main tank get into the QT? that should not happen because it will recontaminate the QT and thus the fish. Same way if you put your hands in the main tank and then back into the QT you run the risk of contaminating the fish again.

Hyposalinity work but it must be constantly at 1.009, and if your instrument is out of wack, only one degree can make a difference.

I used hypo a few times and it always worked for me at 100%.

It is imperative to monitor the tank for evaporation so that salinity does not goes yo yo and rise over 1.010.

Originally Posted by asylumdown

yep, that's correct, What I'm saying is that after they had been in hypo for almost 6 weeks (I was extending the hypo period longer so that I could also dose Paraguard in conjunction with hypo at the end), they got ich again. The tang developed spots of ich out of the blue while the salinity was still down in the 1.010 range, after not having had any at all since a few days after the hypo treatment began. So either there was contamination from the DT, which hadn't been fallowed long enough, or the ich had stuck around in the QT system for all that time even with a hypo conditions and the addition of paraguard, or both.

In either case, for me it failed, but there are a bunch of reasons why that could have happened and is not necessarily a problem with the method per se. However, the more reading I do on the interwebs about it, the less I think it's a method that can truly eradicate the parasite for good.

[asylumdown]

Originally Posted by daniella3d

Your QT was connected to the main tank? how can water from the main tank get into the QT? that should not happen because it will recontaminate the QT and thus the fish. Same way if you put your hands in the main tank and then back into the QT you run the risk of contaminating the fish again.

Hyposalinity work but it must be constantly at 1.009, and if your instrument is out of wack, only one degree can make a difference.

I used hypo a few times and it always worked for me at 100%.

It is imperative to monitor the tank for evaporation so that salinity does not goes yo yo and rise over 1.010.

My Hypo QT system was in my sump. The plumbing under my tank has a massive two way valve on it. When it's turned one way, water enters the skimmer chamber and flows through all 5 chambers of the sump. When I turn it the other way, it cuts off the flow and drops water right before the bubble trap baffle that's in front of the return chamber. Effectively, turning that one valve isolates 3/4 of my sump from the tank above it. Normally I use that valve do do water changes right in the sump, as the largest chamber in the sump is about 50 gallons, but for the hypo process I had the fish in there.

It was an experiment to see if it would work at all, and in my case it didn't. It was too tricky to keep the salinity maintained perfectly because the ATO system was plumbed in to the return chamber, so I had to add water to the QT system by hand. Also, I'm pretty sure there was some splash back from the DT.

I'm sure there are cases where hypo can work, but I didn't have the right set-up for it. Cupramine is pretty much guaranteed to work, and is way more forgiving on my end, though I recognize it's harder on the fish.

[daniella3d]

ok but how will you decontaminate your sump from copper after that? this is very dangerous if it is connected to your main tank as any trace of copper might kill all your corals, and only a tiny amount will do that.

I speak from experience having lost a lot of corals from copper poisoning from carbon. There was not that much of it in my tank, yet I lost a lot of good pieces.

Originally Posted by asylumdown

My Hypo QT system was in my sump. The plumbing under my tank has a massive two way valve on it. When it's turned one way, water enters the skimmer chamber and flows through all 5 chambers of the sump. When I turn it the other way, it cuts off the flow and drops water right before the bubble trap baffle that's in front of the return chamber. Effectively, turning that one valve isolates 3/4 of my sump from the tank above it. Normally I use that valve do do water changes right in the sump, as the largest chamber in the sump is about 50 gallons, but for the hypo process I had the fish in there.

It was an experiment to see if it would work at all, and in my case it didn't. It was too tricky to keep the salinity maintained perfectly because the ATO system was plumbed in to the return chamber, so I had to add water to the QT system by hand. Also, I'm pretty sure there was some splash back from the DT.

I'm sure there are cases where hypo can work, but I didn't have the right set-up for it. Cupramine is pretty much guaranteed to work, and is way more forgiving on my end, though I recognize it's harder on the fish.

[asylumdown]

I moved the fish out of the sump to a 40 gallon breeder in the garage for the cupramine treatment. The reason I chose hypo over cupramine to start out with was because I had too many fish for the QT set up I had available. My sump was way bigger and had way more potential for filtration (one of the chambers was loaded with rock), but I wasn't prepared to dose any sort of copper in my sump. When hypo failed, I moved everyone to the 40 gallon to treat with cupramine, even though it's waaaaaaay too small, and am just dealing with the biggest PITA 65% water changes every other day to try and keep the ammonia and nitrite under control. I keep waiting for this cycle to cycle itself out, but I'm not sure if the external marineland canister filter is up to the job of dealing with 4 medium sized reef fish and 4 anthias. I'm also not sure if the ammonia I keep registering at this point is real ammonia, or false positives from the cupramine, which apparently can cause ammonia tests to pop.