Treating a retail system

[strimstang]

I work at a local pet store that has a fish only display comprised of a dozen tanks per system. There was a recent outbreak of what we believe to be ich throughout the whole system. We do not want to dose copper because there is LR in the displays that we use as our biological filtration as well as sell. How should we go about treating the system itself? We have 2L of Paragaurd laying around would this work well to disrupt and prevent the ICH lifecyce from being completed? How long will this process take before we can sell fish out of this system again? Would a Paragaurd bath on incoming fish work well to prevent this from happening again? Is there a way to sanitize the system and rock (without killing biological filtration) if we move all the fish to a separate QT? We want to do our best to assure no customer tanks are infected but we cannot afford to hold fish in QT or keep systems down for long periods of time.

Hopefully someone can help us.

Thanks for your input in advance

 

[lhm nole]

Would take out live rock put in different system you can use base rock or bioballs for biological and run copper almost all retailers do the now or hypo. You can always asked your wholesaler and they will tell you the same.Of course there is the exception rays sharks and some copper sensitive angles

 

[Chris27]

If the system is only used for fish, then treating with Cupramine would work. Cupramine and calcium (rock / sand) work well together unlike Copper Sulfate (ionic copper) and rock. The calcium may react with the copper a little up front, but after a few doses it'll be easy to maintain.

As for the bio-filter, the copper will have little effect on it. Do think about running bio-balls on a fish only system, they are cheap, work far better then rock, and can be cleaned and sterilized very easily. Nitrate levels can increase using them, but in a fish only system, it's not a problem until levels are extremely high, upwards of 200ppm or more.

Running hypo in a LFS is touchy, it can and will lead to unhappy customers, as most won't re-acclimate the fish back up to normal salinity slow enough, if at all.

 

[snorvich]

Running hypo in a LFS is touchy, it can and will lead to unhappy customers, as most won't re-acclimate the fish back up to normal salinity slow enough, if at all.

Absolutely. Many LFS run at low SG, e.g. 1.018 (to save money on salt, 1.018 has no effect on parasites) and customers often times don't measure the SG of the source water and acclimate improperly.