Doing hypo treatment

[erichm20]

I decided to do whatever I could to save my two remaining fish (pair of clowns) from marine ich. And after much research I've decided to try hypo salinity treatment. I'm going with instructions I found on reef sanctuary from a link Nikki posted in a qt thread (thanks!)

Yesterday morning I setup the treatment tank 10 g (which will now serve as the QT once this awful experience is over!) and filled it completely w water from the DT and transferred the fish. Last night I only changed out one gallon of salt to fresh and the sg is down to 1.019. I will be changing out 1/2 gallon every 8 hours until it's at 1.009. As expected the ph has dropped slightly so my next urgent task is mixing up the sodium carbonate solution to add to get that stable.

Any experience or advice is much appreciated. Wish me luck!

 

[tonedogz]

you'll need a refractometer for the hypo. Also are the fish in the tank as your dropping the salinity.

 

[bskerrichard27]

Lowering salt level can be done more quickly than raising it I'd go 2-3pts a day till u get to 1.009....get a good buffer and watch yur ph very close...and since its new its gunna cycle so watch parms extra close ammonia nitrite will spike so do lots of pwcs when it does...

 

[erichm20]

The fish are in there while I drop it. I've decided to do it slower- .5 gallon per day. I'm also doing 50% water changes every other day since there's no biological filter.

Fish are doing good- eating and swimming around.

 

[erichm20]

Oh faster huh? I was wondering about that bc the larger fish still has spots so I would really like to get to the target salinity soon...

I am slowly adding sodium bicarbonate to keep ph stable. I read the buffers don't work properly when sg is not "normal".

 

[bskerrichard27]

They do work just don't last ph will fluc a lot during hypo just check.it often to keep it within range

 

[Hondatek]

You can go full hypo in a few hours and your fish will be fine. When I buy my fish from the store I have my hypo tank ready. 15 min temp match and dump tank water in every 10 mins for an hour . Then I just let them free in the qt tank.

 

[erichm20]

Ok great. I will be bringing the sg down this morning then. Ph is good with the buffer which is good bc I read it can swing a lot with pure sodium bicarbonate.

Thanks for chiming in!

 

[erichm20]

So yesterday both fish looked pretty bad and I only had the sg down to 1.014. So I did a 50% pwc and brought the sg back up to 1.017 and added copper safe treatment.

I know it is not advised or recommended to raise salinity quickly or do copper while doing hypo but I talked to my lfs' son (marine biologist) and he said they recommend bringing sg down to around 1.017 to administer the copper anyway. Plus at this point the fish could die from the parasite anyway so it's an extreme circumstance that called for drastic measures.

So this morning the fish are looking substantially better! The larger clown still has a few spots but it hasn't been 24 hrs since adding the copper and both are eating good and swimming around.

I'll post w updates.

 

[erichm20]

Spots are gone and fish are doing good- ph is stable- ammo keeps creeping up so I did a big water change today an will do another tomorrow. Current reading is b/w .25 and .5

So now that I've used copper in this tank is it true I can never acclimate anything but fish in it? Or could i break it down and thoroughly clean everything or is there some type of solution that would bring the copper down enough to make it safe for inverts and corals?

 

[erichm20]

Fish are doing great I'm just having to deal with keeping ammonia low because it was a brand new filter so there was no bb present.

Its now been 3 days w out a spot, 27 days left! Lol