Quarantine Tank - Questions

We're planning on buying one of those el cheapo pet store 10gallon freshy kits with the little power filter and such and use it as a SW quarantine tank.

-Do Q tanks need to go through a cycle? We would like to put it to use ASAP to put our wrasse in timeout for a while (see http://www.3reef.com/forums/general-reef-topics/new-fish-old-fish-not-getting-along-57017.html)

-It's better to not have substrate in a Q tank, correct? It makes life easier to dose medicine etc...

-Do I need a rock in there? If I had a rock, I would have to cycle the thing, wouldn't I? I was thinking of putting a piece of PVC pipe in there for fish to hide in instead of a rock.

Any more Qtank advice would be great!;D

 

you will have a cycle of sorts. even one fish poops, and bacteria will have to break it down.

 

Start it with your tank water and you should be ok. Make sure if it is used for Q-tank then it must remain a bare bottom.

I would at least get a 20g or 30g if you are thinking of quarantining Tangs.

 

There have been alot of threads discussing QT tanks lately. Just search quarantine on here and you should come up with a ton of instruction.

 

Ok we went with a 10gallon (don't have any tangs to Quarantine...so it's all good) and bare bottom. It's got 6 gallons of display tank water in it right now, as well as 4 gallons of mixed up salt. 1.024 salinity on the dot, oh yeah, I'm good . We're going to hopefully make it all display tank water next weekend. Well, I guess I can't make it 100% display tank water, but I can get close.

 

You'll want a piece of PVC pipe (cheaper than rock) so the fish have somewhere to hide and are less stressed out.

 

El cheapo, my eye! As long as mom is paying, right????

 

LOL as far as he's concerned it's free-ninety-nine! I would have looked on local forums. you can pick up those AGA 10g aquariums for 5 bucks sometimes.

 

Eh we wanted a new, nothing to worry about tank. And mother dear, I did my part by filling the stupid thing with water (sixty pounds of SW I might add), getting everything wired, setting the heater (it should be at 77 right now, I'm giving it a margin to work with cause those lights felt pretty warm), and getting the salinity to amazing 1.024 on the dot. It was a decent el cheapo goldfish kit from petsmart, mmkay? mmkay.

Oh, and I cut a piece of PVC out just for it, sanded it, rinsed it, washed it, rinsed it in hot water, then rinsed it again. Yeah. AND I filled that sack up with carbon to put in the sump.

 

Well it looks like we didn't need the Q tank for the wrasse. It's good that we have one up and probably cycling right now though...never know when we'll need it you know. So it was good.

The wrasse finally warmed up to the new guy. They swim and eat together (or at least near each other) and get along. The blenny still gets chased off of some of the rocks if he touches them, but others he can sit on. I guess the wrasse doesn't care about those other rocks