Uv light

My tank is just over 4' it's 52"x30" deep the back quarter of the way up is rock. When the tang gets larger ill transfer him into my 300 reef not a big deal.

There's only 7 fish in the tank 6 of them have been together for 2-3 years with no trouble of des eases or water quality.

 

alright that sounds perfectly reasonable...if all fish are showing signs of ich and distress ever since adding the tang and didnt prior then the tank probably cant handle the tang, what kind of fish do you have?

also in my recommendations I would treat the fish and move him to the 300 once done instead of making him a little cramped in the time being

sorry for getting the dimensions wrong but it was the only ones i found for a 92 bow

 

uv will kill most of the free floating ich. and also make you water quality better. which gives the fish a chance to fight it

 

but only most of the free floating, it wont help with the dettached eggsacks and the parasites on the fish...sure it will help them not get reinffected next time if there is a next time meanwhile treatment via hypo would probably solve that problem altogether

 

There is a lot of misinformation out there about ich and UV.

What happens in a closed system (e.g. aquarium) is that a parasite gets introduced. Let's say it's just one for the sake of example. That parasite floats around until it attaches to a fish. It then feeds on that fish until it gets its fill and drops off to create baby parasites. Ich will create hundreds. Those now swim around like the original and try to find a fish again. Again, for the example, let's say that just 10 out of the hundreds find a host. Now those 10 do their thing again and drop off to make baby ich. Now instead of hundreds you have EACH of those ten making hundreds, meaning there are now THOUSANDS of little baby ich parasites swimming around. Want to guess what happens in the next round? Yep, it keeps going.

Now in the ocean Ich has predators and there is a crapload more volume for fish to get away from the ich. The aquarium doesn't have that so the ich gets concentrated when allowed to take hold. Think back to those Deep Woods Off commercials where the guy steps into the glass booth with the millions of mosquitos and gets swarmed. That's what's happening in your tank with ich. Let those millions out in a park and have the guy walk around and chances are he doesn't even get bit.

So when you have an outbreak you can bet you have a super-high concentration in your tank.

How can you control this? As others have mentioned, you can treat the tank, you can remove the food source for ich (the fish) so they die off and then treat the fish separately. Alternately you can attach a UV sterilizer. A sterilizer does not "treat" the tank. Instead it kills many of the free swimming parasites so the concentration is low enough that the fish either avoid them altogether or just deal with the few that attach. A sterilizer will not rid your tank of the parasites, it just controls them.

The last thing to talk about is the UV dosage. Ich is one of the tougher parasites out there. Sterilizers are rated at a dosage measured in microwatt-seconds per square centimeter (mw-s/cm2) at a specific flow rate through the unit. Earlier in the thread someone recommended the Aqua UV sterilizer in a 25 watt size for your tank. First I'll say that Aqua makes a great unit that seems to provide more dosage per watt than others. I own a 200 watt Aqua and it performs as advertised. The 25 watt version advertises 400 gph to deliver 90,000 mw-s/cm2.

What does this mean for your tank? Well, most references say you need 300,000 mw-s/cm2 to kill ich. In another thread someone mentioned it can take up to 800,000 to kill it. Let's go with the 300,000 number for now. To reach that dosage you'd need to lower the flow rate from 400 gph @ 90,000 to 120 gph to get 300,000. That means you'd be passing your water volume through the unit only once per hour.

Aqua also has a 40 watt version that allows 967 gph @ 90,000. To kill a chunk of the ick you'd be able to run at 290 gph, or roughly 2.5 times your tank volume per hour. I'd feel better at this number vs. once per hour. The more water volume you run through, the more ich pass through the sterilizer and die. Just as others have mentioned, however, it only kills the ich that pass through it so it likely will not rid your tank of it.

 

First off the ICH parasite doesn't drop off to make babies. It remains attached to the fish. Actually one doesn't even see the parasite. What we see are the eggs ( cysts) of the parasite. Which when ready drop off, settle on the LR or sand bed then hatch and become free swimming/floating. But the original parasite is still attached to the fish. To say I put my fish in my tank and 2 days later *it got ich* is incorrect. It already had the parasite and is getting ready to lay its eggs. This is why quarantining is so important. So as not to introduce a parasite into an otherwise parasite free tank

 

lol nana no need to get super technical, what he said was probably dumbed down a bit so every one could understand it...he basically said the same thing as you but with less specifics...i mean i know a whole lot about ick and really read into it at some point but not everyone else here has and will understand it but he basically got the gist of it