I'm glad you got the ammonia under control and the fish are ok, great stuff. As for your ph being high, what is the actual reading? You just did a massive pwc so the ph should be very close to what is normal for your salt mix. Adding KH buffer can actually increase your ph so I would stop adding it.
Thanks. The ph was around 9.0, I checked it again later and it dropped to 8.3 on it's own. I believe the reading is off when testing new mix immediately after mixing. Two days later I checked the ammonia levels again and it was 0.6! So I did another big water change, added the cupramine and brought it up close to 0.5mg/l.
This time around though I used water from my main tank and put that in the QT. Since 10-15% water change of my main tank equates to about 70-80% of my QT, it worked out great. I do weekly changes with my main tank.
However now, the ammonia levels are an issue it seems that's gonna continue until treatment is finished. It seems that everyday I'll have to perform 50% water change to the QT since the copper is not allowing the filter media to grow any bacteria. I hardly feed the fish and they seem more stressed with this new environment. It's been about 1 week.
If you have patience to read up to now, I'd like you to continue a bit further with this story as I fill in some history.
Initially there were 4 fish in the main tank (125 gallons+ 12 gallon sump), a powder blue tang, 2 clowns, 1 sailfin blenny. The tang got the ich. I pulled out the fish except the blenny who's impossible to catch. I added a UV to the main tank for the blenny who seems totally unaffected thus far. The other fish went into the QT and cupramine treatment started, first bringing the level to 0.1mg, then couple of days later up to 0.3, and couple of days later 0.5mg.
The treatment had a quick effect as within 2 days (at 0.3mg/l) the ich disappeared from the tang. The clowns were fine. A day or so later the tang died. She had a small scab on her side from rubbing up against the LR in the main tank and I guess it got infected. I checked the water parameters and all was well. My ph was normal, ammonia was at 0.1 because I had done a WC the previous evening, nitrates were around 10, so I took her out of the QT. The clowns were kept in the QT.
Is it worth keeping them in there while the main tank has been running with UV for over a week now? I feel they're much more stressed in there and I am unable to control the ammonia levels in the QT. It seems that since I pulled out the tang early enough, there is a good chance that the parasite in the main tank didn't get a chance to fall off to the substrate to reproduce, and if some did, there is a better chance that the UV took care of it by now because my blenny is acting just normal, he's eating normal, behaving as usual and everything seems hunky dory.
What do you guys think?
cheers
Wael