Learning to quarantine everything...the hard way...

Recently I've lost my two favorite fish to the ich. Well, 3 if you count the coral beauty I took back to the petstore.

Anyway, ich in my main tank bad.

But the tank is full of live rock, inverts and corals. So nothing to be really done to the main tank except for it to sit for 2 months w/o fish to get rid of the ich entirely.

So, this weekend I took ALL the coral and ALL the LR and stuck them in bowls and buckets and whatever, all to get my remaining fish out: A pair of true percs and a couple of damsels.

Next was to put that tank back together. It will remain fishless until the ich cycle is over.

I decided to follow a local guy's routine which seems to work REALLY well for ridding the fish themselves of ich.

I set up a 10g tank with powerhead, sw and a heater.
I put a few pieces of plastic piping in there for hiding places, but no sand rock gravel etc for the parasite to lay eggs in.

48 hrs from the time they went in, they'll be swapped to a second 10g tank with new sw and the first one will be dumped, thoroughly cleaned and set to air dry until it's needed again in 48 hrs. This will happen a total of 4 times.

The idea is for the parasites to drop off the fish like they naturally do, but then to have no place to drop off too, and with 8 days gone by, they should be entirely off the fish.

In the meantime, I have to leave that original tank fallow, so I decided to set up a second sw tank on a permanent basis.

So, yesterday a fellow AC enthusiast came and picked up all my freshwater fish, and I bought 40 lbs of carib-sea or arag-alive sand, cleaned out the tank really well, made my 2-3 inch sand bed (I want to get some nice sand sifting creatures in this one) and it's sitting in wait for the fish in about 7 days.

Now, everything seems to be working out quite well EXCEPT:

I'd like to get some live rock in the 29g display tank, but not sure how to do it w/o waiting 8 weeks for the rock to quarantine. I don't want to go through this ich thing EVER again.

It sucks, quite honestly...it sucks real bad.

Yep. Tough stuff.

Luckily I found a guy in our local club who is super anal about his qt methods. He outlined this whole thing for me and he also says he has about 200 lbs of LR that's just completed his 8 week qt session.

He said we could go to a local store, buy as much lr as i want/need, then head over to his house, throw it in qt, and he'll trade me some already QTed rock, lb. for lb.

From what I understand, ich that has gone untreated with fish still in the tank will die off naturally in 11 months. It just completes it's whole life cycle (in an aquarium).

Ich in a main tank with no fish to host in will completely die off in 8 weeks

Ich in fish with the tank to tank method will usually be completely gone in 8 days.

It's a tough schedule if you don't have a tank to put the fish in for a few months.

And a lot of fish can't tolerate copper, and inverts and lr certainly can't.

I know what you mean about the corals...it's tough to have to pull the entire tank apart...i know..

I've done it twice now...never again.

Another thing I learned: BE VERY CAREFUL SELECTING YOUR INHABITANTS!