LFS fish order pickups

[FitoPharmer]

Originally Posted by Myka

Ammonia burn is easy to deal with - just use an ammonia detoxifier like AmQuel, ClorAm-X, or Prime in the bag as soon as you open it.

It's the pH shock that's a bit trickier, and a good reason to have a QT if you want to buy fish straight from the shipper's box. You can lower the pH (I use API pH Down because it's easy and cheap) in the QT to match that of the fish bag, and the pH will rise back to normal all by itself over the course of the night and next morning which slowly acclimates the fish. You can't drip acclimate if you're doing the pH acclimation because if you drip the pH will rise fast in the drip container. You have to float the fish bag for temperature (keep tank lights off) open the bag, measure pH (with a pH meter not a test kit) and salinity, adjust the pH and salinity of the QT, add the fish (toss the bag water). Leave the lights off until the next day.

How much per bag of ammonia detoxifier?

and something like this to lower the PH?
http://www.jlaquatics.com/dry-goods/...-600-gram.html

[Myka]

It depends which ammonia detoxifier you use - they vary in strength, but it's not much, a few drops really.

I use API pH Down but that Seachem product looks like it would do the trick.

[FitoPharmer]

is this your procedure for inverts as well?

[theokie]

Originally Posted by xenon

Very solid advice given so far.

When we bring in a fish shipment, we prep our incoming system in advance.

Depending on what supplier we use, we know what salinity to expect. We also have a rough idea what temp they come in at (depending on the time of year) so we set our chiller on that system to match the fish shipment.

We then use a CO2 tank to drop the system PH. We have a controller set to increase PH 0.1 for every hour that passes until 8.0 is reached.

Once all the fish are properly acclimated and looking good, they get transferred over to the fish system for sale.

I really like this method of lowering ph, since I have lots of CO2 equipment from my planted high tech days, I will be incorporating this into my acclimation and quarantine procedure

[Trigger Man]

For the more rare higher end fish I prefer to pick up the fish fresh from the shipper. For all others I prefer to put them on hold and pick them up a week after when they are eating.