Ick won't go away even with copper!

[tanked_life]

We'll right now getting a bigger qt is not an option due to lack of funds I don't get paid till next Tuesday. So what I have to work with right now is the ten and I am thinking about putting the puffer which is 3 inches in for 48 hours with the copper possibly

 

[sandwi54]

A 3" puffer in a 10g QT will be a disaster for water quality if you don't have a heavily seeded filtration. You will most certainly kill the puffer that way. My suggestion is to wait on the treatment until you get the QT fully cycled, if your fish are not in immediate danger. You can start now with a table shrimp in the 10g tank and some a little bit of sand from your DT to kick start. Once the cycle is over, put the sand back into the DT.

Also, I suggest that you maintain 0.5ppm of cupramine for 4 weeks straight to guarantee a high ich kill rate. I have tried different time frames, from two weeks to five weeks, and noticed that > 4 weeks always did the job, while 2 or 3 weeks sometimes don't.

 

[CoralsAddiction]

I can understand the financial part. If you go to Home Depot they have $13 totes that can hold 15-18 gallon and you can use that as your tank. Doesn't need to be anything more elaborate. I wish you luck. It's never fun to loose old livestock and spend money the new one.

 

[edsbeaker]

A 3" puffer in a 10g QT will be a disaster for water quality if you don't have a heavily seeded filtration. You will most certainly kill the puffer that way. My suggestion is to wait on the treatment until you get the QT fully cycled, if your fish are not in immediate danger. You can start now with a table shrimp in the 10g tank and some a little bit of sand from your DT to kick start. Once the cycle is over, put the sand back into the DT.

Also, I suggest that you maintain 0.5ppm of cupramine for 4 weeks straight to guarantee a high ich kill rate. I have tried different time frames, from two weeks to five weeks, and noticed that > 4 weeks always did the job, while 2 or 3 weeks sometimes don't.

Also remember if you only treat the puffer as soon as you put him back in the display he will become reinfected by the other fish anyway. You really don't have much choice other then to put all three fish in QT, and leave the DT fallow for 10 weeks so all stages of ich have time to die out.

 

[tanked_life]

Thank you all very much for your response! I will keep the copper at .5 for another week and in the meantime start cycling a bigger qt tank jumpstarted with my already cycled 10 gallon water and a lr or two then I will add all 3 fish and wait ten weeks! Thank you everyone

 

[kingsofke]

You can also look into tank transfer method if you are going to buy extra tank/tote/buckets.