Fishless Cycle and Quarantine Period

[fish4phil]

Fishless Cycle takes weeks. One of the benefits of it is you can add your entire stock once the cycle is complete (some argue half your stock). Either way, how does this play nice with quarantining? If the purpose of quarantining a fish is to make sure it doesn't have a disease that it could pass it off to any other fish, how can you add half or all of your stock once the fishless cycle is complete?

Even if you slowly stocked a 40+ gallon after fishless cycle, each quarantine period of 5 or so fish would take at least 2 weeks each. So adding your 15th fish would take a month and a half, by then some of the BB you built up during the fishless cycle would be gone.

 

[Delapool]

It's an interesting question. This is what I think, I'm sure there are many ways and this I guess may not work for cichlids.
The new tank is the QT tank. Stock to 80% max and give it 3-6 months to see how it all looks. Deduct this for scaleless fish like catfish and fish that need a mature, established tank eg neons. My reasoning on catfish is that if you do get a problem and can only half dose, this is not ideal.

 

[Rivercats]

If you do a fishless cycle it is very easy to get fish and qt them while the tank is cycling. Once the tank is finished cycling you can add the QT fish. One thing tho is you would need to get something like the seeded sponge media that Angels Plus sells for the QT tank.

You would have to have a huge initial stock of fish for them to produce 4ppm of ammonia daily which is what you build up to in a fishless cycle. So there is no reason you can't add your full stock. And honestly with this being said most people would get and add all new stock at once to the cycled tank but anything new down the road would be QT'd.