New reefer looking for help

bampi · Jun 20, 2016

Evening! So I'm new to the hobby and loving it so far! I purchased a used JBJ28 HQI off of CL. Cleaned it up, did a water hold test, drained it and then put in some live sand/rock and salt water from the LFS. I let it sit for a month. After about 12 days I had a very big diatom bloom. After the 30 days I put in a clean up crew. Snails crabs and a shrimp; all alive and well to date. The tank is now two months old and today was a giant panic day. Had a little bit of a heat wave here, and since I'm so close to the beach the house doesn't have AC. Long story short:

Things started looking sad in the tank when I got home from walking the dogs.
Tested EVERYTHING! Ammonia 0, nitrates 0, nitrites 0, TH 5 drops, everything seemed to be in order. Salinity 1.024, ph 8.1. Then noticed my temp was 88!! I immediately turned the MH light off lifted the lid and made some quick rash decisions.

Firstly I have abandoned the hood for now. I put on a Kiessel LED. Then installed an aqua world 4 fan unit, seems to have helped a bunch. Is there anything less than a chiller that will help me maintain temps much lower? With the temps from today one fish got stressed and appears to have ich now. I don't have an isolation tank; so copper is out. I ordered some garlic, ich attack, and Metronidazole. Hoping to get it taken care of with that.

To summarize; Ich, how to treat it in tank without copper as an option. Any success stories? Heat, how to beat it! What have you done to your tanks to prevent overheating on hot days?

Diesel · Jun 20, 2016

Sorry to hear about your hiccup.
There's really no in tank treatment for your fish, once ick is in your DT and you'll keep livestock in there the ick won't be gone, ever.
Treatment protocol calls for 76 days fallow and treat fish in a QT, many do the TTM.
@Humblefish and @melypr1985 can tell you all about this and more.

Humblefish · Jun 20, 2016

@bampi I would start by reading this: Ich eradication vs. Ich management

As far as the heat goes, I would try blowing a fan (or two) in-between your MHs and the surface of the water. To disperse the heat. If that doesn't work, you may have to ditch the MHs altogether, and go with LEDs or T5s.

melypr1985 · Jun 20, 2016

bampi said:
To summarize; Ich, how to treat it in tank without copper as an option. Any success stories? Heat, how to beat it! What have you done to your tanks to prevent overheating on hot days?

There arn't any true ways to cure ick in the DT without going fallow and treating the fish separately. Warning! Do not put Metro in the display water! You can soak that into the food with Focus to bind it, but I dont think it's going to do anything for you in this case.....unless the fish have intestinal worms.

Use a fan blowing across the top of the tank to help cool it.

Of course this was already covered by Humblefish but this is my long way of saying "i agree"

Welcome to R2R also!

bampi · Jun 21, 2016

Well. Much to my dismay fish were dead long before any management efforts could go into effect. I'm taking this opportunity to rethink a few things and build this all up a little better.
Since I have 2.5 months of waiting now. I'm going to continue to let snails and shrimp hang out. I have a friend who's going to watch over and nurse some of the coral back; ammonia spike since fish decided to die while I was at work.
I had the opportunity to buy a 1hp chiller, and jumped on it. Now over the next few months I'm building a new stand, was looking at ADV-100 sump. Need to research best way to connect a sump with jbj 28, but get all the goodies hooked up and run a small qt tank this time around. Thanks for all your help; hopefully this next try will be much more successful.