Figured out that if I take pictures when the lights are at 12K, it's not quite so horrible.

Spent 300 bucks on frags/mini colonies at RCC yesterday, and I'm realizing just how long/amount of money it will take to get this tank looking full! I had two tester pieces in for the last couple of weeks to see what would happen under my lights/with my water and I was pleasantly surprised. Even with the algae issues, one semi-browned out frag has turned a beautiful cream/lilac, and the other frag's colours just popped.

First, FTS front and back:

http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...n/892291d1.jpg
http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...n/a1640356.jpg

http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...n/3d718da2.jpg

This was my first tester frag, it was only a little blue when I got it, now it's practically turquoise
http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...n/44d00348.jpg

My second tester coral is the one in the middle. The mother colony has browned out at the store pretty significantly, and when i got it, only the tips still had any purple, the rest were brown. It practically glows now!
http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...n/6d505efb.jpg

Edgar thinking he's going to be fed
http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...n/d494df99.jpg

These frags are pretty browned out right now, but I'm hoping something magical will happen under my lights.
http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...n/189bc8b6.jpg
http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...n/50984794.jpg

These two colonies are so encrusted on their bases I didn't think it was right to break them off. Presently banished to the sand bed until I am sure no aiptasia have hitchhiked in on them. The one in front was in the process of browning out, but I can see from the tips that it has a lot of potential.
http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...n/214fa4ec.jpg

And just to totally put the question of whether radions are strong enough completely to bed...
From this:
http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...n/f8d682bd.jpg

To this:
http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...n/b5bfb1ea.jpg
After running the lights at 100%. Whoops. It's on the sand bed, 25 inches down, a full 32 inches under the lights.

Nice corals
Keep the updates comin' :wink:

You've come a long way! Fish and coral now and they're looking really good too. Not that I qt corals or fish... but pretty brave to place new coral on the sandbed in the display to wait and watch for aiptasia =)

I've become pretty aggressive in my response to aiptasia, the first on I see won't be ignored or treated chemically, but will be removed (rock and all) and blow torched to a cinder. Those two corals are the only ones whose base rock went in, and only because I couldn't easily remove them.

I also added a cleaner wrasse today, that luckily readily accepts prepared food. I know they're no solution to ich and disease, but it's been my experience that they help a lot when it comes to general tank health. My bristle tooth tang and harlequin tusk are almost fighting over him.

I also picked up a 40 gallon breeder today and started seeding some bio balls in a bag in the sump (for a canister filter) so I can run a quarantine tank on demand now. I won't e adding anymore fish until they've been through a two week fattening up period going forward.



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I am here: http://tapatalk.com/map.php?gcjxzi

Just to put the word out there, I'm looking for frags! Frags frags frags! If you're selling/tossing/moving or what have you, I'm definitely interested. My tank looks like a desert!


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I am here: http://tapatalk.com/map.php?4z3q1h

Well all I can say is that's a wonderful looking desert you have there. Love the look of the corals as they've come back under the LED's.

I'm sure you will find things starting to fill out quickly with good water and good light.

As for frags, you're amazingly lucky to have both RC and CoralMaster in Calgary to choose from. I'm sure they will continue to have stuff you'll want.

Been a while since I updated this. Lots of changes, some of which have been posts in the main section, so I'll try and be brief.

#1, My ATO system was a danger to itself and others. I knew it, but was waiting on the right equipment to fix it. Needless to say, the disaster happened before I got the chance to remedy the situation. Had a salinity disaster while I was out of town for a long weekend, and toasted almost all of my corals. Thank the universe this was still a new tank. I only took pics of a couple carcasses:

http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...wn/file-30.jpg
http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...wn/file-29.jpg

This whipped my butt in to gear (even if I couldn't really afford it) to finish my ATO system the way it was designed to exist. My R/O system now feeds a 50 gallon reservoir in the basement (instead of being the direct ATO system), and there are two pumps in that 55 gallon drum that 1. run the ATO and 2. Send up water for water changes when the time comes.

Remote R/O system:
http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...wn/file-17.jpg
upgraded Tunze osmolator powered outlet:
http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...wn/file-18.jpg
How the whole thing runs through the floor:
http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...wn/file-19.jpg
Backflow preventer under the cabinet:
http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...wn/file-22.jpg

After the salinity issues, I had a serious outbreak of ich. Like, deadly. I lost about half my fish, and stopped the carnage by catching every single one of the buggers and converting part of my custom sump to a QT system. I had some issues with the cycle this created in the QT system, but as of a week or so ago, all toxic compounds were registering undetectable. My remaining fish are:

Copper band butterfly
Purple Tang
Powder Blue tang (a new addition to the QT system after the cycle was complete, my initial Powder Blue was lost in the ich outbreak)
Harlequin Tuskfish
mated pair of Bengali Cardinals
4 square spot anthias (1 male 3 females)
Longtail tripod fish
Leopard wrasse

My QT procedure has been to lower their salinity to 1.009 for 30 days after the last visible spot (10 days remaining), then I'll dose them with Seachem paraguard for 3 weeks. Then 2 weeks of observation to make sure the ich is gone. This will have left my Display fallow for 10 weeks. Seachem assures me that no part of Paraguard will remain 'active' after the treatment is complete, so I don't need to worry about the rocks and sand in my sump that will have been treated. I added a spare canister filter to the QT system, and both the nano LED light systems and light timer I had laying around, as my sump is normally unlit.

Here's some photos of the QT portion of my sump from today (the QT area is on the left, the return chambers to the main tank is on the right):
http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...wn/file-20.jpg
Close up:
http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...wn/file-23.jpg
CBB hanging out near the pump that does double duty draining the Water Change Chamber (which also happens to be the main QT chamber ATM), and the return pump that drives the QT system:
http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...wn/file-25.jpg


In that time I've had ongoing serious issues with my overflows, as Herbie style overflows are really fickle when you've got your overflow plumbing all connecting to the same outlet in to the sump. I've got a forum thread about this in the main area so I won't elaborate here, but I'll just say that Herbie style overflows aren't always appropriate for every setup. Research them carefully for how they'll behave on your own specific plumbing set up before taking the plunge. I spent today converting my main overflow system to Dursos, which worked beautifully on my last 90 gallon tank. In a normal system they're a little noisier than a Herbie, but since my tank's plumbing is contained within the walls of my office, I don't notice it. Presently, I'm still using my double herbied gate valves (I think I described them a few pages back?) to control the water and bubble levels in the return chamber. This prevents splash-back into the QT chamber. It's not perfectly optimal, but when the QT process is over, I'll have a fickle free sump that still allows me to do mostly automated water changes.

I used plugs with threaded 3/4" holes in the top to cap my dursos, and drilled them just right to prevent full siphon while minimizing bubbles. Right now, since I'm doing this weird, not optimal, hybridized herbie'd durso, I don't have the threaded cap in, which means I'm still sucking some air down the drain pipe, but it's a controlled amount of bubbles, and I've got really fine control over the water level in my return chamber for the time being. It's also not that much louder than my last overflow system:
http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...wn/file-26.jpg
http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...wn/file-27.jpg

I also took this opportunity to add more lochline to my return line, and switched to flattened outputs, as the rounded outputs I had were creating this nasty jet of water that blasted one area of my rock:
http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...wn/file-28.jpg

And finally, I've started replacing some of my lost corals while everyone is in QT. Getting all the fish out meant removing 100% of the rock, so I got the chance to re-scape. I took that opportunity to remove some of the base rock that made my tank look too packed, and I tried to follow a more balanced "2/3 to 1/3" aesthetic ratio that you normally follow for photography while balancing the two sides. I like this much better:
http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...mdown/file.jpg

So glad to see this back on track. Really like this tank and given some of the common "building a house around the tank" issues we've faced, I need this tank to succeed!

Crappy to hear about your losses and the MI issue

Glad to see it hasn't got you down

#1 mistake: Not having a fish room with a proper QT system in it. My Fiance was so concerned about resale we didn't put a dedicated room in, but we also didn't leave any logical space for a separate QT system anywhere in the house. I tried taking over the laundry room for a while, but that was met with serious resistance. The only thing that has saved me has been the extra time spent designing my sump. After what I've gone through in the past month, I wouldn't run a system without a full prophylactic treatment regimen for every single new arrival again. People say you can't avoid ich, I've done the research, and I'm fairly confident that you can, you just need to be prepared for it.

Also, you think you've planned for everything, but the devil is in the details. 99% of the work happens in an hour or two, that last 1% can take 2 entire freaking days. Each time something happens, I make the adjustments that will make this tank what I originally intended it to be, but man, getting there has been a labour of love. Planning a house around a tank is hard for all the reasons that you know it will be (contractors, timing, design, etc.), but it's made equally hard because it's almost always a completely unique circumstance, and there's no 'out of the box' solutions. Everything I did on this system was specific to this system and this set up. Some things are working beautifully, others I would change if I had the chance, but what I have to keep reminding my fiance (who hates how much time the tank has consumed) is that this is a brand new system. Almost nothing is perfect in it's first iteration, and each change impacts some other part of the system. I keep thinking I'm 'Done' with the set-up, but I keep finding ways to make it less fickle, and less likely to behave in unexpected and unintended ways.

My best advice is to be prepared for the best laid plans to not turn out the way you intend on a first pass, but if you've put enough forethought in to the 'bones' of the system, nothing is irrecoverable.

Also, I should add that while they aren't cheap, buying a sh*t-ton of ecotech product was the best investment I made. So far their service has been above and beyond what I would have expected from any company, and they've been 100% on the ball with helping me make things work properly. You'll notice a dark spot on the far right in the FTS above. The power supply on one of my lights started going nuts a few weeks ago and Ecotech went the distance to get it repaired. I've got a new power supply en-route to me now.

And that concludes my shameless plug.

Man it's been a while since I updated.

Tank has gone through some changes. Had a monster ich problem, tried fixing it with cut corners, which, you guessed it, not only failed, but made my display tank look like garbage. I tried using my modified sump as a QT for a hypo treatment. The hypo protocol didn't work for me (likely do to the fact that I couldn't prevent backsplash from the DT and my salinity fluctuated too much), but for all that time, the DT had no protein skimming, no water changes, no GFO, no bio-pellets, no nutrient export of any kind. And I kept feeding the display. Fast forward 6 weeks and the display tank looked like this:

Front:
http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...wn/file-37.jpg
Back:
http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...wn/file-36.jpg

Basically it looked like garbage. After the fish got ich again in the hypo treatment, I moved them to a separate QT tank and started a copper treatment, and returned my sump to it's normal operation. This had hte nasty side effect of forcing me to reset my fallow clock to 0 days after already having a fishless display for nearly 6 weeks. Needless to say I'm itching for my fish to be back in a proper home. They're banished until November 30th.

Since then I've been aggressively correcting all the problems that co-opting my sump for 6 weeks caused. I started GFO again, tuned my bio-pellet reactor, started doing water changes a couple of times a week (my salt budget has exploded), and got a small army of Mexican turbo snails. I also cut back on the amount that I feed the display. However, none of that was really all that effective. It was obviously working, as I didn't even have to clean the glass anymore, but that nasty hair algae is tough as nails. It's almost like once you have it that badly, you have it. You can slow it down but it's so pervasive that it sucks up the nutrients faster than any of your nutrient reduction systems can remove them. For 3 weeks I was manually removing at least 2 pounds a week and it was still growing back, albeit slower than it had been. So I ordered Algaefix Marine from an Asian seller on Ebay who didn't mind shipping to Canada (it's technically banned here, and most US retailers won't ship it) and started dosing as per instructions. I'm 4 doses in, and this is the tank now:

Front:
http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...wn/file-39.jpg
Back:
http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...wn/file-38.jpg

I've also gone on a bit of a coral shopping spree, have rescaped the rocks a tiny bit and moved stuff around to make room for all the new things. I've also upgraded my Radions to the TIR lenses and picked up an Apex controller unit, which has made my life oh-so-much easier. Not having to unplug things when I need to clean equipment alone was worth the cost, but the feed cycles are also invaluable. I haven't set it up online yet as the ethernet cable in my cabinet is dead (another thing for the warranty people!), but the control panel is pretty straightforward.

So far the only disasters have been to do with my RO system. I was using a switched timer to bring the water up from the RO reservoir in the basement because I couldn't find any three pronged switched outlets. Basically it had a 'timer' mode and an 'on' mode. I deactivated all the timer points so that it was effectively an off switch. I went out of town for 10 days, and the night before I was refilling all my dosing chambers and must have knocked the timer on the switch with the bucket, which told the timer to switch on at 4 pm the next day. When I was 2000km away. Thank any deity you can thank that my roommate just happened to be home when the pump kicked on called me freaking out. She was literally walking out the door when it happened, and had she left 5 minutes earlier 55 gallons of fresh water would have emptied on to my office floor. Needless to say I ordered proper switches that day.

Anyway, that's kind of it. I'm looking for someone who wants to sell a frag of red planet, Oregon tort, cali tort, or any other 'premium' level frags in Calgary, so if someone reading this has some they want to sell, let me know!

Well that Algaefix sure seems to have worked... wow! Hope the turn-around continues. Your SPS looks happy from what I can see.

I guess you got the memo that October is/was tank rehabilitation month. Looks like things are looking up for sure!

Love how the tank is looking. That Algae fix sounds like it's working wonders for everyone who has tried it!

Hopefully you've exhausted Murphy and his laws no longer apply to you.

I doubt it. Every time I think 'nothing can possibly go wrong now!', it finds a new way to screw with me. For example, last night after I posted I discovered that the people who were working on our HVAC system pulled the R/O hose out of the float valve when they were using the rain barrel I store my RO water in as a desk in the utility room. My R/O unit has been running continuously since Friday. The only reason there wasn't a major flood was because I did a massive water change on my tank this weekend, and then a massive water change on my QT tank the next day, so it was only overflowing for a day or two. The water was spilling out the back of the barrel, then running along the wall behind the furnace and hot water heater, so I didn't see it until it started trickling out in to the middle of the room. By that point it had soaked through a bag of left over grout, and completely filled up one of the slab heat access panels in the floor. Thankfully the utility room walls are all plywood, so the water didn't wreck them, and it doesn't seem to have soaked through to the baseboard on the other side.

I've siliconed the R/O hose right to the float switch now. Hopefully that won't happen again. I'm going to look in to setting up an emergency drain on the rain barrel so that if it does overflow again, it will just go straight to the drain in the middle of the room.

It really does. I am shocked at how well actually. I wish we didn't have to order it from Hong Kong! I'm hoping that with the algae from the rocks gone, the corals will plate out farther and faster. In just a week I've noticed such a drastic change in all of them

lol, it was? I didn't even know that was a thing! But let's say I did and that this was for charity or something...

oh it totally is man, and you passed with flying (sps) colours.

Haha, good to see you back @ it Adam and even better to see the Algae fix is working for you. Are you happy with the TIR upgrade? I opted not to complete it, my Radion has the power to burn my coral @ 45% I don't think adding additional intensity is what I required.

I am happy with the TIR. To be honest I can't say I notice much of a difference in how bright it appears to me, but it seems to blend the colours better. I could really see the different colours of lights on the sand bed as they shimmered, and while that's definitely still there, it's way less severe.

Before I got the lenses, the brightest my lights got was 75% with all channels at 100% and that was only for 4 hours in the middle of the day, the rest of the day it was either ramping up or down. After the TIR lenses I actually increased the intensity slightly, I kept the 4 hour period where all channels were at max, but over that 4 hours it increased from 75% to 80%.

I wasn't all that happy with radions in general to be honest, I wasn't digging the colours in my tank, or how washed out it looked, and was seriously considering ditching them and getting halides or plasma. Then I had computer issues, lost my entire windows partition, and along with it, my radion program. I wasn't sure what that would mean for my group, and last time I had to re-set up a group (one of the units failed and was replaced under warranty) it was 6 hours of hair pulling infuriation. Once they're set up and the group is exactly the way you want it they're easy as pie to use, but getting them to that point, modifying, or adding to a group of radions is an exercise in pure, unadulterated rage. It's their biggest flaw, I think. It took daylight savings throwing my lights off by an hour to convince me to try re-programming them, and, much to my very pleasant surprise, the group seems to be stored locally on the units, not in the config utility software. I had to set up a totally new schedule, and I finally see why these lights are awesome. My last program clearly sucked, because now that I've gone back and done it all again with different pre-sets that ramp in to each other better, the tank is practically sparkling.

I will say they still don't hold a candle to T5s in terms of coral colouration. I was just at another reefers house buying some frags, and his frag tank had an ATI unit over it. I've never seen colours that vibrant on a coral before. I picked up a green montipora frag from him that I realized I already have a piece of, only the one that's been in my tank has turned a pale yellow/green, while the one in his tank looks like it's been painted with dark green neon paint. Some corals actually improve in their overall coloration, developing an almost internal glow, but then others really seem to fade and wash out under the radions. I have one mini colony that started life in my tank as a light pinkish green Walt Smith frag. It's now a dark brown/slightly rust coloured colony with the slightest hint of green iridescence when the lights are all royal blue. While I have two other colonies that started out as rust coloured with the tiniest hint of blue on the tips, and are now glowing cyan on the main branches, and electric blue at the growth tips. The frags I just picked up are all super electric shades of green and red, so we'll see if they hold their colours over time, or if they wash out. I've been playing with placement to try and maximize the colouration of each colony, but things are still growing, and nothing is burning, so I don't want to decrease the intensity.

man, a simple question you ask and I give you a novel.

Hey Adam the tank is looking sweet man , I wish that mine looked like that. anyways that is a another story.:cry:

Well this morning has been pretty rough. Sometime last night my QT system crashed. I can't figure out what triggered it. Came down to feed them this morning and the water was the colour of milk. Every single fish is dead.

They were only 10 days away from going back in the display. I've never wanted out of this hobby as much as I do right now.

Oh wow that is rough. Sorry for your losses. :(

Sorry to hear this Adam

You've built such a great tank ... I hope you decide to get some more fish

So sorry to hear about this. You have built an amazing setup and it would be a shame to quit now!

Wow I couldn't imagine how rough that must have been for you! Keep trucking, you tank is amazing!

I've done some investigating. We had a party on Saturday night, and every time I went near the laundry room, the door was closed. I kept opening it, but the last time I checked was about midnight. There's indigo stains all over the inside of the wall and door, right at butt height, so you can imagine why the door kept getting closed...

We have a massive server stack in there that powers the home automation and distributed audio/video system for the house. We know it puts out a lot of heat, which is why for the last 7 months the door to the laundry room has never been closed. While I was doing a complete reset to the QT system today, I closed the door to see how hot it would get. After 2 hours it was 30 degrees in there. I've done every test I can think of on the water they were in, but I don't have a max/min thermometer. My best guess is that the water got too hot and the dissolved O2 fell below levels anything could survive in. The tank had too many fish for it's size already, so I doubt there was a wide margin of error for oxygen. It's either that, or a drunk party guest decided the fish needed a drink. Pretty brutal considering how close they were to going back in to the main tank. Between the failed hypo treatment in the sump and then the QT system, I've had them 'in treatment' since August. That much time and effort blown to pieces less than two weeks away from the finish line.

Does anyone know if a tank crash like this will also damage the bacteria bed in a canister filter? I tried to save it by running it in an empty salt bucket with water from the nuked system, and today I cleaned the tank and all the equipment and re-filled it with 100% new salt water. The canister filter is back attached to the QT tank now, so I dosed it with enough ammonium chloride to hit 1.5ppm this afternoon to both keep the bacteria alive, but also to test whether it's going to go through a cycle again. After 6 hours the level of ammonia doesn't seem to have fallen any. I'm not sure if that means my filter is toast or not.

I'm going to be out of town more than I'm in for the next 4 weeks, so I won't be getting any new fish for a while, but I'm going to try and see this as an opportunity to do this whole thing again properly. I'm going to add fish slowly, and only after a rigorous prophylactic treatment of copper. All new corals are going to be quarantined in the new cadlights all-in-one nano tank I just bought to make sure that not a single drop of outside, potentially contaminated water will make it in to my system. It's not going to be easy, but I am going to try my hardest to make my system pathogen free going forward.

I'm also going to take this time to try and deal with my growing aiptasia problem using berghia. I'm pretty sure the reason I never had success with them in my last tank was that a) I let the problem get so out of hand the nudibranch's couldn't make a dent in their short lifespans and b) I had tried peppermint shrimp first (which didn't work) and I'm pretty sure the shrimp were eating both the nudis and their eggs and c) I had wrasses that I'm pretty sure were also eating the berghia. Since my tank is going to be fishless now for at least 6 more weeks (groan!), I may as well try berghia again as there's nothing in that tank that could eat them, and the problem isn't so bad they couldn't clear it out.

Other than that I'm actually blown away at how well the display is doing. Now that the algae is gone, corals that seemed like they were in stasis are bursting to life. Frags that hadn't grown an inch in months are sending out base plates at a rate I didn't think was possible. I had no idea how inhibiting algae could be to coral growth. I tried taking some top down photos tonight when the lights were on their way to being super blue, and man, I just can't figure out how to make the LEDs jive with my iPhone. The photos look nothing at all like it does in real life, it's like the sensor only sees the blue, and then captures is as horribly as possible. I tried adjusting the white balance in photoshop afterwards, and this was the best I could do:

http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...wn/file-44.jpg
This coral came to me completely browned out, with only the tiniest hint of blue at the tips. It's probably changed the most out of all my corals. This pic is as close to how it looks in real life as I could get with photoshop.

http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...wn/file-45.jpg

Was out of town for the past couple of days, came home literally shocked at how much the coral had grown. Getting rid of that algae was the best decision I ever made!

Also, did a 50 gallon water change, skimmer clean, full change of phosphate media and hanna phosphate test in... 45 minutes. Bam! The time and money planning this thing is finally paying off.

Now to get some fish...

I don't know what to say about your system Adam as it looks like you have it under control ...

All I will add is you may want to add an alarm for your QT temp ...

Sorry I don't have any better advice :wink:

Really sad news about your fish bro. You're definitely due some good news for a change hope things only get better from here.

Thanks friends!

So I ended up having to cancel my trip to Hawaii because of school, which sucks on a whole different level, but I consoled myself by going on a fish binge today. My QT tank is completely cycled at this point, so it was either keep dosing ammonium chloride, or by something with a metabolism to do it for me!

Most expensive purchase:
Golden rhomboidal wrasse

Most sentimental purchase
Harlequin tusk fish. The one I lost was easily my favourite fish.

Everyone was eating after a couple hours in the QT tank today, so tomorrow I'm going to start ramping up cupramine levels for a prophylactic treatment. If I do it right, I should have fish in my tank again in 3 weeks.

On another note, I took my skimmer apart tonight for it's first ever major cleaning. When I put it back together I realized that for hte past 7 months the adapter that holds the pump to the skimmer body has been loose. I was complaining about the noise it makes way back in the beginning, and did need to get a part of the pump replaced, but now after a simple tightening the skimmer is absolutely silent. Now once I get the bearing replacement kit for my Reeflo Dart return pump, my tank should be near silent.

So I'm officially done using copper. For good. Of the 7 fish I bought to replace the guys who died, two survived the prophylactic cupramine treatment. I knew some or all had ich (flashing, came from tanks with visible ich present), so there was no way I wasn't going to treat them, but good lord.

To add insult to injury, I have now done enough research on Cryptocarion irritans to quote it's life-cycle stages in my sleep, and I'm no longer convinced that the recommended course of cupramine (or any copper medication) is sufficient to eradicate ich from a system. It will definitely clear it from the fish, but since you're 'supposed' to leave the fish in the quarantine tank for a couple of weeks after completing the copper treatment, you run a very real risk of the fish becoming re-infected in the QT from tomonts that lodged in places you couldn't clean (the bio-media of your filter, for example) that encysted before copper reached therapeutic levels. Crypt tomonts can easily stay encysted for 5+ weeks, and no one would recommend treating a fish that long. Basically, the 14 day recommended course of treatment on the cupramine bottle is woefully insufficient to clear the parasite based on well established published literature. I think they recommend 14 days because anything longer is dangerous to the fish.

The only treatment method that I've seen that makes any sense from a 'total eradication' perspective is the tank transfer method, which takes the wild card tomonts out of the picture completely. As a result, I've completely re-done my QT system to accommodate for this method:

Gone is the 40 gallon breeder with external canister filter, and in it's place is two 15 gallon tanks, each with their own light, heater, and power head:
http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...wn/file-47.jpg

I transferred my two survivors from the 40 gallon (which still had therapeutic levels of copper, I let it run for my two survivors an extra week) to one of the 15s, which was sterile and, taking care to transfer as little water as possible.
http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...wn/file-48.jpg

I then bleach bombed everything that had been in water in the 40 (heater, powerhead, canister filter, PVC lengths) and cleaned and dried everything. I was thinking I would then re-set up the canister filter and cycle it in a 5 gallon bucket in the garage so that I could add it back to one of the 15s after the final tank transfer was complete for a future batch of fish, but now I'm thinking that filter might be overkill for a 15 gallon tank:
http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...wn/file-50.jpg

Instead, I might cycle the media from an aquaclear 20 in a bucket and just put that on one of the 15s after the last transfer is complete.

For the 2 fish that I do have, I've basically just done the first transfer of the transfer process, but since they spent three weeks in therapeutic levels of copper, and were in that water right up to the moment they were transferred to this new tank, I'm not sure if I need to do the full transfer protocol. There's no tomonts in this new 15 gallon to re-infect them now that the copper levels are zero, so assuming there's no signs of re-infection by thursday, I might just put them back in the display. I bought a 2 litre of prime to deal with the ammonia that's going to result from keeping fish in filterless tanks.

So far, I can say that the biggest fear I had about using this method was the stress to the fish, but while the transfer itself was clearly unpleasant for them, within 3 minutes of being in the new water they were acting totally normally, and ate an hour later, so it's the trade-off of the acute, but highly temporary stress of catching them every three days, vs the stress of continuously subjecting them to poison for weeks and then them being re-infected. I think the acute but temporary stress is better.

Next time you buy some fish, maybe try Hyposalinity instead of a copper based medication. I have had excellent results in clearing up any ich from purchased livestock and it is 100% medication free.

I tried hypo and copper and I lost fish both times. Copper - was my own fault. Didn't know you can't use Amquel at the same time. :(
Hypo - for some reason I could just not keep the pH up.
I've been doing the tank transfer for over a year, going on 12 fish, haven't lost one yet and so far has been 100% effective.
I understand not everyone has the room for it, but it sure beats everything else I've tried. For actually transferring fish, I syphon out everything but 3" or 4" of water and gently use my hand to catch them. This can't be done safely with every type of fish, but everything I have has done great with it. They don't seem to mind, no thrashing around like you see in a net. It's my first choice for sure for ich treatment or QT.

I tried hypo, it didn't work for me. To give the method it's fair due, my protocol wasn't exactly perfect, but I don't put much stock in it in general. Copper makes sense to me because its a poison and has been directly shown to kill free swimming stages of the parasite in published literature, and tank transfer makes sense because its designed around breaking the known and published life cycle of the parasite, but hypo works based on an assumption that 100% of the cryptocaryon irritans population has a magic salinity tolerance threshold of 1.009 SG. That assumption is repeated as fact in forums, and seems to work for some people (and thus, some populations of crypt), but it also seems to fail for more people than the other two methods. I have no doubt that some of those failures are due to protocol problems on the aquarist's part, but I would bet money that some of those failures are because some strains of ich can tolerate any salinity a fish could survive, especially if its been acclimated slowly to that salinity with your fish. It's already been documented in brackish estuaries and tidal river systems, so there is definitely a wider range of salinity tolerances in the population than previously believed.

Yah, you're experience with tank transfer seems to be the norm. Again, it's forums so take anything people say with a grain of salt, but the posts I've seen where people say it failed, it seems like they either contaminated their transfer tanks with materials from an infected system, or they were mis diagnosing the disease.

I'm using a clear Tupperware with holes drilled in the bottom to drain the water, but that's because one of my new guys is a rabbitfish. No interest in getting stuck by those spines.

Maybe have the water drain off and pour a jug of freshwater over top to further rinse him off. Not sure that can help any just an idea.

Brett, I don't see that doing anything as it's not contact with FW that irritates MI, but rather the interrruption of osmoregulation that kills it

Adam, I hope the tank transfer method will do the trick for you
You've been through enough already
For long-term usage, I'd suggest AM Guard over Prime

For me, I just finished a round of Hypo with a Gramma and Kole and it seems to have taken care of the strain of MI they had
I ran the QT for another 4 weeks at 1.025 and saw no more MI
Of note, I ran my Hypo Sg at 1.008 rather than 1.009
I couldn't keep my pH up past 7.8 most of the time, but all went well

yeah i mostly said it because it might rinse a few off the surface of the fish but i'm guessing they're attached better than that.