Sick Fish - Can't solve the problem

[Jaws]

Sure you don't need em?

[Aquattro]

Nope, I'm good. My rock has caught up to the load and I'm not running the foam anymore.

[Jaws]

Ok thanks. On a positive note, most of the fish have bounced back after the water change. The powder blue, purple tang and moorish still aren't eating but they're swimming around better at least. Hopefully they bounce back too.

[Myka]

I'm confused, is the 300-gallon the display? It's the display that has 30 lbs of rock? If you don't have enough rock you will need ceramic rings or bioballs or something like that. Foam is a bad idea because it gets clogged and can end up being anaerobic (bad). Do you intend the tank to be fish only or a full reef? If you want a full reef you will need rock rather than bioballs/ceramic rings, but if it's fish only then bioballs are very good at their job and inexpensive.

How big is the treatment tank? CP can definitely affect biological bacteria if you use a significant dose of CP. If you stick to usual dosing of 10-20 mg/L it shouldn't affect biological bacteria. What do you have filtering the treatment tank?

Also note, ammonia detoxifiers are NOT compatible with Salifert test kits (I think Elos is the same, but I haven't checked specifically). You will get a false positive no matter how much detoxifier you use. The SeaChem Ammonia badges work well (I've used literally dozens of them over many years) and although they work very well as "alerts" they are terrible at giving an actual measurement, so don't rely on it for the amount of detoxifier to dose. API test kits are compatible with detoxifiers, but API isn't the most reliable test kit...

[Aquattro]

Originally Posted by Myka

How big is the treatment tank? CP can definitely affect biological bacteria if you use a significant dose of CP. If you stick to usual dosing of 10-20 mg/L it shouldn't affect biological bacteria. What do you have filtering the treatment tank?

That's the issue. QT is 300g, filtration is 30# rock. Not enough to process a full fish load. Foam isn't a great long term media, but it's available now, fully seeded and ready to go in for short term treatment.

[Jaws]

So I had all the fish in a 400G display tank plus I had 300G of volume downstairs in my fish room conditioning of sump/fuge/rock tanks. When the fish became ill I drained the 400G, caught all the fish and brought them downstairs. They're evenly distributed between the downstairs tanks now and the display tank is closed off from the rest of the system for now. The main display had all the cycled live rock in it and the rock tank downstairs had the 30 pounds of rock in it that I suspect caused the whole problem to begin with. I removed the live rock a couple days ago when I started worrying that could be causing the problem.

[Myka]

Ok, so you had the 400 and the 300 plumbed together, added the rock to the 300, fish got sick, moved them from the 400 to the 300 and closed the tanks off from eachother. Then you removed the 30 lbs rock and added some seeded foam?

Ok...

Still, in treatment tanks, I don't like to rely on biological bacteria to take care of the ammonia. I have Ammonia Alert badges in every system. They've saved my hide more than once. FWIW, AmQuel is much more concentrated than Prime, doesn't stink, and is cheaper. Use the bottle to figure out a dose, but re-dose if the ammonia isn't gone. I know the bottle says something about not overdosing. If there is ammonia for it to "eat" then you are not overdosing. Overdosing is the addition of the detoxifier when there is no ammonia to "eat".

[Aquattro]

So how are things coming along?