I qt all new fish for 6-8 weeks. If the qt tank has to be treated for any reason, then the qt time starts over when the treatment is done. Its better to be patient and safe than sorry if something breaks out in your main tank. From everything I have read, the life cycle of ich has many stages that can live undetected for weeks, so I play it safe and keep them in qt past the cycle stage. If no signs of illness by then, they go into the big tank. Jolene
this is how I do it. After loosing a lot of money to marine velvet I set up a QT tank.
I float the bags in the qt tank. Test the water in the bags. Make my qt tank equal that. Usually i leave about 5 gallons out of the top so I can just turn on the ro/di to dilute it down or add salt to bring it up.
Once the fish are swiming around for 2-3 days i start to lower the salinity to 1.009 to perform Hypo-salinity. This kills ich. If for any reason they develop anything other than ich I raise salinity back to 1.025 and switch to copper treatment or whatever is needed for that particular condition.
I will qt fish for 4-6 weeks in hypo, if nothing shows the tank goes back up to 1.025 and the fish are ready for the display.
If they show anything at all they are left in the qt for atleast 4-6 weeks after the treatment has ended.
I do not want any more disease in my tank. Loosing 10 fish in 12 hours was no fun. The last two went carpet surfing so they didnt meet the same fate as the others who got ate up by the crabs b4 i could get them out.
I had to flush a powder brown alive. Sucked but he couldnt swim on his own and was beeing ate alive by hermits. Had no choice by the time i found him. Talk about a shame
TTM upon arrival, and 8 weeks after that in observation tank.
+1, anything less than 72 days total leaves you with a risk of introducing an infection into your display tank. Yes it is a long time, but if you have a nice fish you do not want to run the risk of anything shorter. You may get lucky with shorter quarantine periods, but sooner or later you will get burned.