Quarantine Tanks

[rrasco]

Washing machine (Just don't tell my wife) Elegant Reef has them

I have a handful of them leftover from my cichlid breeding days, just curious how you sterilized them for your main system. Do you ever use copper in your QT?

[alton]

Right after I set up my 300 I had a blue face angel in Qt that was not doing well so I decided to place it in my sump where it perished but not before infecting my tank with some kind of disease that killed 3 bluespot jawfish, large chevron tang, flame angel (10 years in our system and my wife’s fish), and a couple others. The only good thing was my copperband made it through. After this every fish went into QT and not into my tank until it is eating great and looking great for a month to 6 weeks.
Typical routine:
Fish comes in and it gets acclimated to my water with a heavy dose of prazi pro.
After an hour it gets placed into another bucket with tap water conditioned with Prime for 10 to 20 minutes. If it lays on its side I help it up to move around. Some are fine, some are not. The regal in the picture loved it, but don’t go past 20 min. I ran the blueface for 25 min. and I almost lost him.
Next comes the tub or tank. I like the tub because of the sides being black the fish is hidden and only sees you when you feed. The QT tank or tub has a heater, foam filter with an air pump, a power head, small light, and prazi pro per instructions. After a couple weeks I add a piece of poly filter and wrap it around the power head. Sometimes I add liverock with softies attached, the prazi pro does not affect the coral. Some say Prazi pro slows appetite but I have not noticed.
The following is how long some of my fish took to eat:
My First Chrysurus took 4+ weeks to eat, my second took a couple days
Redsea Regal Angels – juvenile took 1 day, one adult took two weeks the other took three weeks
Most others take a couple days
This is what I do, is it perfect probably not. There may be better ways but you have to do something, if nothing else your new fish has time to eat, get fat, and tame down before placing them into your DT tank

[rrasco]

I started out QTing, then got lazy and have skipped it the last few times. I'm working on getting my fish room out to remedy this. I've regretted it a few times, mainly because I believe it's wise to get that fish settled in because they are highly stressed from travel, bag, travel, bag, etc. Also gives them time to fatten up and assimilate in with their new tank mates. A weak, stressed fish getting picked on by territorial mates rarely ends happily ever after.