Drip Acclimation

[claytaylor32]

Hi still fairly new to the hobby...I feel that I have somewhat mastered drip acclimation, but I do have one question.

How do you readjust the specific gravity in the display tank to get it back to where it needs to be after drip acclimating marine life?

I have noticed that if you drip acclimate for a long amount of time, it can lower the the amount of water in the tank significantly. If I just top it off with freshwater, won't that adjust the specific gravity/overall salinity of the water?

Thanks!

 

[homer1475]

I keep a 1 gallon jug of salt water around just for this, and its fresh every week. I always have left over water when doing my weekly water changes. I either dump it out, or fill up a jug, but I never keep it in a jug for more then a week.

Are you not running a QT? If you are, instead of drip acclimating, why not just setup the QT to the salinity at your LFS. Then just float the bag for 10 minutes and dump in.

FYI, you should never drip acclimate for more then an hour, ammonia can build up pretty quickly. Even at an hour, It should still only be a couple cups of water.

 

[cloak]

How big of a tank do you have? In smaller tanks this might be a problem, but not so much with larger ones. It really shouldn't take a whole lot of water to acclimate the fish to begin with, assuming the SG of the water they're in and the water you have aren't miles apart.

 

[snorvich]

How big of a tank do you have? In smaller tanks this might be a problem, but not so much with larger ones. It really shouldn't take a whole lot of water to acclimate the fish to begin with, assuming the SG of the water they're in and the water you have aren't miles apart.

In a perfect world, that would be great. Unfortunately many keep their tanks around 1.024/6 and many online vendors and LFS ship at 1.017. Going up is difficult on the fish, going down not such a big problem.

 

[albano]

FYI, you should never drip acclimate for more then an hour, ammonia can build up pretty quickly. Even at an hour, It should still only be a couple cups of water.

IMO, if you're not QTing, the shipping bag should be 'temp' acclimated for 5-10 minutes, then dripped for no more than 20 minutes.

 

[claytaylor32]

I typically do quarantine all fish but not all marine life...when a qt, I drip acclimate to display tank too which is probably silly.

 

[nuxx]

Call me weird but I float, never lost a fish after that.

Add a cup of water each 10 minutes for about 1 to 1.5 hours.