Hospital Tank

[e55MD]

I am thinking of setting up a large hospital tank to treat ich with copper. It would involve moving all fish from my fully stocked 400 gallon DT. Does anyone have any general idea of how much/how often I would need to do water changes in a 200-300 gallon HT, bare bottomed, no-live rock, PVC decorated set-up? I am trying to determine if this is a feasible option for me.

Thanks for any input/suggestions.

 

[Ruskin]

Since HT dont usually have the necessary filtration its a good idea to change water weekly to help keep the param's in a safe zone for your fish. I'm assuming you are using a tank that large because you have a lot of fish/large ones. If that is the case then you are probably looking @ once a week as well. It might be less if you can split the fish up into smaller tanks (might be better for aggression as well) but even then you have to keep an eye on ammonia, nitrites and nitrates.

 

[limitdown]

Instead of moving all of the fish to the HT why not move all of the coral to the HT? Compared to fish, corals are helluva lot easier to catch! Also move most of the live rock. Then you can do hypo directly in the display.

If you still want to move fish to the HT, then put in a few pieces of live rock for filtration. However, you might not want to put the LR back into your display, so just keep it in the HT and keep a few damsels in there to keep the LR alive.

I always completely tear down my hospital/quarantine tank when it's not in use. When I have sick/new fish I just grab a small sack of ceramic rings from my sump and use that for biofiltration. After treatment, I completely tear down the QT again and dump the ceramic rings.

I know some people here hate bioballs/ceramic rings, but I'm a huge fan. They're cheap and disposable, whereas LR is not.