Hospital tank

[mgraf]

I am setting up a 20 gallon hospital tank to treat several fish over a period of time. I am planning on using copper sulfate. My questions are; If I am treating for ich, how long would the fish have to remain in hospital tank before the parasites life cycle was broken? Could I then move that fish to a QT system and begin treating another in the hospital tank? Could I treat with Prazzi for flukes at the same time with copper?
I also have a mandarin and a copperband that will need to be treated. I have heard they may not react to the copper treatment so well. Any advice?
I haven't added any treatment to the hospital tank yet. A friend gave me a bottle of NOX-ICH (Malachite Green). Any thoughts on using this? Or should I just stay with the copper plan?
Any live rock in the hospital tank?
This is going to be a big undertaking for me, I plan to run my DT fallow for 8 weeks. I plan to catch one or two fish and treat, then place them into a multi-tank QT system. Once I get all the fish treated and in QT, I can begin to start my fallow period.
I want to do this one time so, any advice to get me through this correctly would be helpfull.

Thanks
Matt

 

[Newsmyrna80]

First I would advise reading the stickies at the top of the forum on crypto. Snorvich has quite a few that have great info and will answer most of your questions. I'm personally not a big fan of copper due to some fish are sensitive. You also have to be careful of mixing meds and ammonia detoxifiers with copper. For those reasons I use the tank transfer method. But that's just my preference...others have used copper with great success. As far as the LR you can not use it in a hospital tank with copper.

 

[Spar]

This is going to be a big undertaking for me, I plan to run my DT fallow for 8 weeks. I plan to catch one or two fish and treat, then place them into a multi-tank QT system. Once I get all the fish treated and in QT, I can begin to start my fallow period.

What Newsmyrna80 said re: stickies.

Also, since you are treating for Ich, the 8-week fallow period won't be enough. You need to run fallow for at least 72 days. (10-12 weeks recommended). 72 days is the maximum time period Ich cysts are known to last before the adult parasites emerge. Usually they all emerge in just 8 days; however, iff you add fish back earlier than 72 days, might be really unlucky.