copper ??

[silence88]

iam getting realy fed up lattley with disease, iam thinking of setting up a FO or FOWLR and doseing copper in it and just not bother with QT anymore, iam think either lion, eel, puffer, trigger ect, but if i go thise rute and latter down the road i take the tank down can it be used for a reef with corals/inverts? iam gesing any rock/sand would be no good, but i plan on useing just CC that i have and live base rock so no big lose realy,

and my big question is i have never used copper before, always to scared i would OD it, do i need to test for copper if i use it either in a main tank or QT? like dose 10 drops of cupramine per 10g or something liek that?

 

[limitdown]

The consensus is that inverts and corals can never be kept in a tank that has ever been treat with copper. HOWever, I am not sure that is 100% correct. If you remove all sand, rocks and everything else so that you're left only with a barebone tank (ie just glass and silicone seals) and then rinse that out like crazy with hot water, vinegar, bleach, then all copper should be removed. Unless you believe that glass and silicone seals will absorb and release copper.

I run a 250g FO system and do n't ever plan on keeping corals (again) and I've dosed it with Cupramine 3 or 4 times. After treatment, I did a big water change and now run carbon and Seachem's Cuprisorb in the sump. If Iwere to set up a QT that could treat all of the fish at the same time, then it would pretty much be an exact replication of my existing system. So it's not very practical.