What kind of salt for ich?

I treat with heat only, skip the salt. Too many cories/snails/loaches to mess with it. works like a charm, I've beaten two outbreaks in different tanks, never came back.
When I used ich meds, I lost about half of my fish and it came right back.
Heat treatment is not immediate. It may take a week for the spots to fall off. For that matter malachite green isn't immediate either. Just keep the temp at 86 degrees and bump up wc. Keep it up for a month or so altogether and you should be ich free.
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Jumko said:
I use the Walmart "Great Value" brand - costs about 48 cents for 26 oz. The only ingredients are salt and calcium silicate. No clue what calcium silicate is, but it hasn't caused any problems whatsoever at 3 tbsp per gallon.
Click to expand...

Calcium silicate its an anti-caking agent.

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The heat just detaches the ich parasite from it's host, but it remains in the tank. The salt is what kills it. It may be that if you keep the heat up long enough, the ich can't attach to a new host and eventually dies as a result anyway. I prefer to use salt/meds, because my a lot of my fish don't care for 86 degree low oxygen water any more than they do salt or meds, so I figure it just gets everything taken care of quicker so they can get on to recovering.

If I remember correctly, scaleless fish especially don't do well with salt. But I have also seen warnings about scaleless fish on ich meds as well. Don't know which your loach would react better with. Perhaps using just heat would be worth giving a try. Be sure to treat your cories as well, even if they haven't showed signs yet. If they were in the same tank, they've got it, it just may not have appeared yet.

When does it get better? For me it was when I started buying livestock from reputable sellers/LFS instead of big box stores, making regular water changes a priority, quarantining new fish & critters before adding them to my main tanks, and making sure to keep the water temperature of the tank stable when doing a water change (not adding water that's more than 2 degrees hotter or colder, which would shock the fishes systems). Haven't had any sign of disease in my tanks for quite some time. The last time was a case of callamanus worms that got into my 60G using ghost shrimp from Petsmart as hosts about a year ago. Without thinking, I tossed them straight into my 60G as food for my cichlids, and they infected them all. Fortunately, all but 2 of my fish pulled through once I got the right meds to deal with them.
 
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Ich is off my fish!!! I will keep temp up and do a water change in about 3-4 more days..thanks so much!!! I have to get a little quarantine tank for new fish. Luckily it was on the loach and he seems fine now. I really have to get used to how he sleeps upside down...I keep thinking he died
 
You can do a wc now, just make sure the water is matching the warmer temp.

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A Loach. No wonder. The have no scales, they are FW ICK magnets.

But glad all is getting better.
 
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