cupramine in main tank

[ReefPharmer]

I want to knoa what to expect when I use either cupramine or coppersafe. I will remove shrimp and as many crabs as I can find. I know I won't be able to keep corals but I am going to go fowler. My q is, will these kill my rock and spike ammonia from snail deaths? The tank is a 180 gallon.

 

[sandwi54]

I have gone through this before and here is a list of things to expect.

- Your live rocks and sand will absorb an enormous amount of copper and make dosage monitoring very difficult. You will likely end up dosing 3-5 x the regular dosage before the rocks/sand saturate in copper absorption.

- Copper will kill everything except for the fish. You will have an ammonia spike. How much spike depends on how much life there are in the rocks/sand. It may or may not be a problem in a 180g. If it is a problem, you will be scrambling to change 100g of water at a time as you cannot use dechlorinators to detoxify ammonia with cupramine, so always have 100g of water on hand.

- Here is the kicker, and not something you'll want to hear. Copper is algaecide and will kill ALL of the algae. You may be thinking wow that's perfect for me, but get this: without all the algae, there is nothing to absorb the nitrate and your nitrate will easily shoot through the roof (> 100ppm). Coupled with the fact that you can't use a skimmer, you will be changing 40% of the water weekly to combat the nitrate.

- At the end of the treatment, removing all of the copper takes a LONG time. I'm talking about months, not weeks. You are literally waiting for all of the copper to leech back out of the live rocks to be absorbed by carbon or cuprisorb, so you will be leaving carbon/cuprisorb in your sump for many many months. FYI, after I finished my treatment, it took 3 months before algae started showing up in the tank again. That gives you an idea of how long it takes to completely remove the copper. Also, it was not until 6 months after the treatment ended that my nitrate started dropping. During that whole 6 months, I was doing 40% water change weekly to keep nitrate under 80ppm. For my tank, 40% is 100g. Imagine the amount of salt I had to go through during those 6 months.

So hopefully you see the negatives of dosing copper into DT. Is it worth it? Definitely not, and I will never, ever, ever do that again. I did that in my early days of fishkeeping and didn't know better, and in turn gave myself way more trouble than if i had just picked up a large QT to perform the treatment. 100g of water change per week is A LOT of work! not mentioning very expensive!

 

[b0bab0ey]

I want to knoa what to expect when I use either cupramine or coppersafe. I will remove shrimp and as many crabs as I can find. I know I won't be able to keep corals but I am going to go fowler. My q is, will these kill my rock and spike ammonia from snail deaths? The tank is a 180 gallon.

I've done it successfully back in the day on old school systems. Meaning, no LR, just some dead coral skeleton pieces for decorations, and either using crushed coral w/ an u/g filter or sand with a sump/trickle filter w/ bio balls. I never had any ammonia issues, fish lived for years and years afterwards, and my copper levels stabilized after some initial absorption.

The problem with how you're trying to do it is you probably have a lot of LR in a 180. That's a lot more rock than I was using, and the copper absorption will just go on and on and on. And then once you're done, it will be leaching copper back into your tank for what will seem like forever.

If I were you, I'd roll the dice on going hypo in your DT with that kind of setup. You can search on here and find a lot of threads with experiences from people who have done that.

 

[ReefPharmer]

Thank you for the detailed write up. To be honest,its more than I expected. my problem is I got an Achilles and ofcourse he broke out. My previous tank inhabitants were hypod but Achilles did not do well in a 40 gallon. he recently started to eat nori so hopefully he will fatten up and beat this bout. The other tangs are pow blue, yellow and desjardini. My other option is to get a big tank as a qt and hope tang lives that long to fatten up and aclimate properly.
I don't want to add any more fish until I either empty the tank for 2 months or treat it. I planned to add angels in future

 

[sandwi54]

Given that you only have four fish (hopefully they aren't big), a used 55g will be a nice QT. They often go for $50 on craigslist so you can pick it up for cheap.

I strongly advise against coppering DT based on my experience. If you have to treat the DT, use hypo instead. However, keep in mind that DT hypo doesn't work every time due to the rocks/sand providing good breeding grounds for ich.

 

[ReefPharmer]

Given that you only have four fish (hopefully they aren't big), a used 55g will be a nice QT. They often go for $50 on craigslist so you can pick it up for cheap.

I strongly advise against coppering DT based on my experience. If you have to treat the DT, use hypo instead. However, keep in mind that DT hypo doesn't work every time due to the rocks/sand providing good breeding grounds for ich.

My problem is that Achilles just started eating. I dont want to dump him into a 55 and have him hunger strike again. I am considering doing hypo in this case. The powder blue and Achilles aren't getting along all that great so I had to use eggcrate to separate half the tank for Achilles to chill without being irritated. So with that, I could not really put them both into a 55 quietly

 

[snorvich]

Good advice from sandwi54.

 

[MrTuskfish]

Good advice from sandwi54.

+1

To the OP; you're looking at a major wipe-out if you don't start using a rigid QT on all new fish after your current problem is solved. Tangs in a DT without natural algae growth for grazing. is also a big potential problem.