who uses a QT tank

Still waiting for my 75 to finish its cycle so i am sitting and thinking about what to do with my 46 gal bow front. So my question is how many people have a qt, I have read many mixed opinions on removing a fish out of dt with ick or anyother diseases so would i only use a qt for new fish? Is a 46 gal to big for a qt and do you need to keep a qt running all the time. Also do you need a skimmer on a qt? I wanted to sell my light and skimmer off the 46 and use that money for a new skimmer for my 75 gal tank.
Thanks mike

 

I use a Qt TANK for all new fish. I didn't use to but I had a nasty battle with ick. The only reason I had a bad ick problem was I added to many fish at once.

You don't need to run it all the time.
You can set it up when you need it.

The thing that sucks about setting it up when you need it is you have to do more frequent water changes. This will keep your water quality in check.
I would suggest to always keep a sponge in your Main DT sump. So in the event of needing to QT you can use that sponge to set up some bio in your QT tank

I am debating myself if the QT tank is worth it for all new fish

This is very difficult to wait so long to add to the DT.

 

I QT. It's a simple setup of a 20 gallon, powerhead, Aquaclear filter, heater, light, and thermometer. You can use a QT for observation only or to treat for ich or other stuff.

If you QT everything you add properly you should never ich in your tank. If you don't get ALL of your fish out of your tank when you have ich, you cannot get rid of it unless you treat the DT.

Keeping ich out of your tank isn't easy. In fact it's a royal PITA. Most people don't bother so you see it everywhere. If most people used QT tanks you wouldn't see it as much.

I almost lost all my fish to ich after living with it successfully for several years. My hippo tang got popeye so bad that I thought he was a goner. I got him into QT and treated with hyposalinity. Almost a year later and he looks nearly perfect. I used to be in the camp that said keep the fish healthy, garlic, etc and ich wouldn't be an issue, but something eventually kicked it off and it hit with a vengeance. I got lucky cause I ended up only losing 1 of my fish from that.

I never would have noticed this before, but my fish now look much better, general health and color is better than when I had ich in my tank. And I have an unbelievable amount of satisfaction knowing that my tank is ich free.

I recommend QT's for everyone. So much in the hobby could be improved if everyone did this.

 

You dont need to run a skimmer. Since you would only have 1 maybe 2 fish at a time there is not much to skim

 

I absolutely agree. Although I am only new to this hobby I have experienced ich in one of our tanks and after a lot of research on this site the best and only way to remove it was to get all of my fish out in a QT for a minimum of 6 weeks so the Ich cycle finished in the DT. I still have another 2 weeks with my fish in the QT which is a PITA because the tank is too small with only an airstone and heater and my Nitrites and really high. Meaning i need to do water changes every day to keep the fish happy.

 

how are you treating the fish in the QT?

I"ve posted several times on 3reef that there are only 3 ways to effectively treat ich. I keep forgetting about the fourth of swapping fish between tanks. I'm not sure how effective that one is since you are trying to time the switch with the ich lifecycle.

 

I know this is against popular wisdom and I may get flamed but I've never quarantined and I've never had an ich outbreak due to the introduction of a fish. I had one fish rapidly die of some ich-like disease months after introducing any fish. I woke up one day saw it laboring near the bottom with white spots all over it. It was dead by the evening. Whatever it was and however it got in there it never spread to any of the other inhabitants. I also had my hippo and yellow tang get a few spots on their fins shortly after introduction. It never spread to other fish nor did it spread on the tangs to more than a few spots.

My theory, and it's only mine, is that ich is in all of our tanks already. Degrade the water conditions enough and weaken the fish and it will strike. I believe that most ich shows up in new fish only because of the stress of the move. Therefore, I believe in getting them in a nice big comfy fully cycled tank with lots of hiding spaces with no ammonia, nitrites or nitrates. If you put them in a quarantine tank that isn't set up with living inhabitants to maintain a cycle it won't be cycled which will further stress the new fish.

Now, if you want to QT corals because you're afraid of flatworms, nudis, red bugs, etc... That's a different story.

 

My LFS owner has the same opinion. I am trying to prove him wrong. I had my DT fish free for 6 months. I have QT every new addition. He says I will still get ich at some point and that it is always there. I hope I never get ich in my tank. This is the hardest thing (in a hobby) that I have ever done. It it so difficult to have a 265G tank with a tiny yellow wrasse and 2 clownfish. It will take me a year to get the fish I want in the DT.
That is if everything goes well!
Then to see so many people on here buy fish and have them in there DT the same day makes it even harder to QT everything!
I have came so close to giving up on the QT thing

 

you never had an ich outbreak but you lost some fish to some "ich-like" disease? What do you suppose it was if it wasn't ich?

I know people who smoked 2 packs of cigarettes a day and live into their 90's. Would you recommend that everybody smoke 2 packs a day? I know people who never do water changes and claim they get away with it. Would you recommend that? If you haven't had an issue yet, then you are lucky.

Most people have ich in their tanks but it's because people don't want to spend the time to get rid of it. Your theory is not only yours. Tons of people have it cause it's more convenient if we can convince ourselves it's not an issue than in dealing with it.

If ich isn't a big deal then why is there so much discussion about it and why are there so many products out there to deal with it? Simple, because it kills fish.

If we consider ourselves good conscientious aquarists, how can we live with something threatening in our tanks that we can do something about? Is it okay to put stuff in our tanks in danger if we think it's too hard to remove it?

 

Don't give it up. It's the right thing to do. It's much better to have a large tank with only a couple of fish in it cause you are QTing than to spend a ton of money on cool fish that all get wiped out in a week cause you introduced something bad.

There have been several people in my reef club that lost all of their fish within days cause there seems to have been a velvet outbreak out my way. One was a 300 gallon tank and the guy lost dozens of fish, some that he had had for years. It's now costing him thousands to replace all of that.