Quote:
Originally Posted by howdy20012002
hey there
sorry about that..I answered in a hurry and on my Iphone
what I meant to say is....
I personally like the salifert Copper test and I find it to be the most accurate
I have gone through 3 API testkits and I have yet to get any reading that even looks close to what the reference cards shows.
I have used seachem and still do, but have had issues with a couple where they weren't showing what they were supposed to show.
I can't really comment on the others because I haven't used them.
so, salifert would be my first choice
seachem second
however, with any of them, if you do get a reading is not enough close enough to what you think, definitely retest.
I would personally buy 2 tests kits and test with both just to make sure.
copper, although very effective at killing parasites, can be just as effective killing your fish if the dose is too high.
let me know if you have any more questions.
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I think the reason API kits are such garbage when testing cupramine is because the copper in them isn't really either 'free' or chelated. The copper is bound up in an organic amine complex, which makes it invisible to some tests, like API. It's also why you need to be really careful about dosing reducing agents like Prime or anything designed to make ammonia non-toxic, because they also reduce the copper in cupramine which can make Seachem's recommended copper level of 0.5ppm lethally toxic. For that reason, I wouldn't use cupramine in a system that wasn't 100% cycled, because it's so dangerous to dose water conditioners with it, and the most commonly available test kits for ammonia are salycilate tests (like APIs), which can break apart the amine complex and give a false reading of ammonia.
Also, I wouldn't necessarily agree that copper is that great at killing the parasite. It's totally ineffective against 2 out of the 4 main stages of the parasites life cycle, and one of those stages, the encysted tomont, is perfectly capable of staying in it's bulletproof little cyst for way longer than any fish could tolerate exposure to copper. In some instances, a two week course of cupramine (as recommended by Seachem) will be enough to clear a QT system of the parasite completely, but there are going to be just as many cases in which a tomont sits patiently in the QT system for 3 or 4 weeks, hatches after the aquarist has halted the copper treatment, and re-infects the whole system, leaving the aquarist to scratch their head and wonder what the hell is going on.
In all my reading and communicating with people who have made careers out of studying marine parasites, the only treatment method that has been shown to be 100% effective in eradicating the parasite from fish completely is the tank transfer method, or a hybrid method that functionally does the same thing, which is remove tomonts from the system and destroy them. The only things that are known to kill C. irritans tomonts in-situ will also kill all your fish.