I just read your whole build! SOOOOO IMPRESSIVE!!!
Wow! I'm totally speachless!
Best wishes with your fishes!
Best wishes for a speedy recovery to your fishes as well. It is very stressful to get an ich outbreak, tear down the tank, set up a HT whithout being prepared and deal with poor water quality that may stress and kill the fish perhaps more than ich itself.
I believe the reason many people are against quarantining is very practical: During quarantine they see their fish health decline and quite often this is because poor water quality. I believe that with a little bit of preparedness this can be avoided. Pre seeding the filter sponges and filling the QT with DT water works very well and gives you an instant cycle
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I really like Quinine Sulphate as compared to copper for several reasons: First and foremost it is very effective against cryptocaryon, it is effective also against resistant strains that have been described. Second it is selective against protozoan so does not kill the nitrifying bacteria in the filter. For me the main draw back on using copper was the instant wipe out of the biological filter and resulting in instant decline of water quality. This was more detrimental to the fish than ich itself. I wish I could but I do not have the time to do water changes twice a day. Third QS is very well tolerated by the fish, as you dose the QT I haven't seen yet any bad reaction at all. The fish keep on swimming as normal. breath normally and behave normally. I like that as opposed to copper where soon after adding it, the fish became agitated, start bolting and clearly show signs of irritation.
The only thing I hope is that LFS and transhippers keep on using copper in their systems. If quinine use become widespread we are bound to see the appearance of quinine resistant cryptocaryon that usually will replace the sensitive strain killed by QS. As this happens we will lose one of the most effective treatments against ich.
While I am writing this post I kept on thinking on why you may have had this ich outbreak. You were running a stable tank for some time. I believe it is important to try to do some kind of root cause analysis and try figure out the cause of what have happened, and especially rule out the presence of a slowly creeping up problem in your system (mainly thinking water quality issues beyond the parameters we usually test for) that may have contributed to a decline on your fish health and ultimately the ich outbreak.
You will probably need to do some water changes as needed anyway and I do those with DT water. My DT also benefits from these more frequent water changes
