Tap Water For Quaranteen

[Stuart60611]

As I posted in this thread, I am dealing with a major disease outbreak in my display. I am now seriously considering biting the bullet and quaranteening and treating all my fish leaving my display fallow for an extended period.

My issue is this. My R/O unit is not the greatest, and since I am going to have to quaranteen so many fish I am going to have to have a fairly big quaranteen tank which will require a lot of large water changes during medicating and to keep parameters in check. What I would love to do is use tap water treated for the quaranteen period. It would make things much more manageable. However, I am concerned that using tap may interact badly with medicating, such as using copper. Also, I am concerned that certain tap water conditioners for aquarium use may interact badly with medication. What is safe? Finally, I think if I do this the easiest way to do this would to be used a large plastic tub for the quaranteen tank because it is very light, cheap, and easy to deal with. Any suggestions on one that would be large to hold a bunch of fish?

 

[limitdown]

Water conditioners will make copper very lethal, so you will need to use water that is dechlorinated. Which means you'll need to pass the water through a GAC or carbon block filter.

You should perform 2 tests on your tap water, copper and nitrate. If nitrate is under 10ppm, then you're fine since the water isn't being used for corals. Most fish can tolerate very high levels of nitrates (100ppm+) for extended periods of time without problems.

I have a 50 gallon plastic rubbermaid tub for water changes. It also doubles as a backup quarantine tank.