Update: Unfortunately, Not Much of a Change...But Plenty of Stains from the Meds
Okay, now I'm really upset -- and so is my wife. We did a 50% water change tonight PHYSICALLY BY HAND by removing jarfuls of water, then replacing all the water because the syphon tube/gravel vac we purchased at Petsmart just wouldn't work; I don't know what we were doing wrong, but no matter how many times we pumped the thing, we couldn't get the syphoning to begin.
But I did add the proper amount of Seachem Prime after adding the new tap water...
So, we said "to *** with that," and we did a manual water change. After pouring the hour of time into that, we discovered that not only is every ornament, plant and sealant in the tank stained blue, there were traces of the Rid Ich that must have dripped across our brand new carpeting of our new two story house. The spots are everywhere. Because this is a dye, I am not expecting them to come out, but we called for Stanley Steamer to come tomorrow anyway in an emergency situation.
The most we were able to do by hand was 50% of a change -- this didn't seem to eliminate much of the cloudy or blue-tinged water, but I'm simply done with the liquid ich treatments -- we also bought a Top Fin heater, which I set up and submerged, but I gotta tell ya...this thing is absolutely IMPOSSIBLE to read in terms of the temperature indicator -- there's like a plastic orange colored block stack that is supposed to go up and down with temperature changes of the knob on top, but I can't read the thing...
What's the procedure in a case like this in terms of heating up the water to begin a heat treatment for ich? How do I know if the degrees are simply going up one by one as it was suggsted to me to do in the case of my sick goldfish?
If anyone could help with this new round of dilemmas, I would greatly appreciate it...I'm already prepared to throw this whole kit out the window for the destruction of the new tank, ornaments, gravel, airline tubing and our home's carpeting from the blue dye based Rid Ich...