Coming out of fallow

[Damon Jensen]

At long last I am 7 days from coming out of fallow. Please give me some feed back on my plan.
I have a 200gl FOWLR.

During the fallow period, I left crabs, snails, peppermint shrimp, and my sea hare, who recently passed. I just added 3 very small nudibranch in my overflow as it is the last place I am seeing Aiptasia. I have fish and an eel in two QT tanks. I have been occasionally feed the crabs seaweed and crab cuisine. I have not scrubbed the tank, but have started water changes. All levels are good. I also removed my live rock to help rid the tanks of aiptasia. Live rack have been back in for about 30 days. I have also add BioClean and smart start complete.

My QT I have had to change 25% of the water every other day because of the ammonia levels.

All that said, this is my plan
1) first I will add the eel only for about a week to get more life back into the tank
2) at fallow plus 7 days, start adding DT water to both QTs
3) At fallow plus 14 add QT fish back into DT

I have learned a very expensive lesson by not having QT and Hospital tanks. So my plan is to drain the two tanks and reestablish them ready to replace my poor friends I lost. My thought is to use DT water to reestablish the two QT tanks and maintain all three tanks with the same PH and such.

Let me know what you think.

Thanks

 

[DeniseAndy]

Congrats on coming out of fallow!!!
The plan sound very conservative and I would never knock that.

I assume you have had the eel and fish for quite some time and know the order in which to add them. I have never kept eels, so not great on that, but just know that anything added second can be construed as food for the current occupants. This goes for fish, clams, corals, inverts, etc. I worry the eel will think the fish are food.

Maybe do the fish first then the eel last. Just a thought.

I set up my qt's the day I get fish in. I used to use dt water, but only for less waste reasons. Do a water change, save the water for a qt instead of throw it out. I get my initial qt to match the bag water and then bring it up to levels needed for treatment. When treatments are done, I move levels up to dt levels over afew days (depending on how far off I am) usually on spot by then anyway.

I only match the temp, pH, salinity to dt. Then move the fish.

Good luck!

 

[Damon Jensen]

Thanks, so no issues with the eel and fish relationship. In fact as I have killed my tanks several times, 3 of the fish and the Zebra moray were originals, about three years. Nothing kills these guys.

In one QT Puffer, file and eel. (File and puffer are about a year old)
in QT 2 is Picasso, rock mover wrasse and unknown blue guy with a yellow tail. He was actually a test fish in my first tanks....the dude won't die! He is normally the aggressive one with new fish, but only the firs day.

The wrasse seems to have some issues with new fish, but only certain individuals.
The trigger has never been an issue.