Acclimating Your New Fish

[Weaver]

Never heard tell of the drip method until this thread.Use the float method but try my best not to let any lfs water into quarantine tank
BTW metfan thats a brilliant quote in your sig

 

[Durbkat]

I think we need to be filled in on this


WHAT IS THE DRIP METHOD!?

 

[Ethos]

Maybe if you looked in the link I posted earlier, you'd know.

 

[Durbkat]

Oh never mind. )

 

[Vegan Peaches]

After reading over the drip method, I've decided it's not good for my setup, considering it involves leaving my fish on the ground in a bucket where my cat can get to them... also, it permanently takes water out of your tank with that whole syphon thing... so then you have to add dechlorinated tap water back into your tank to make up the difference, so how is this method any better? I suppose it keeps a nasty bag out of your water, but that's what quarentine tanks are for, right?

 

[love_fish]

I selected other. Here's what I do.

I take a bowl or something and rest the bag in the bowl. Then, every 3 - 5 minutes I add a coffe mug amount of water. I do this around 4 times. It seems to work very well, and involves no floating.

 

[Ethos]

Yeah, for my large common plec, I did a sort of drip method, except I added 3 cups of water every 10 minutes...
The only reason I did this though was because I was afraid of it, lol. It was huge!
I didn't really have a net big enough for the whole fish to fit in so...lol, I had to use two nets...I teel ya, it was my most tramatic time putting a fish into a tank. It was huge and it flopped around, so if it fell out of the net, I sure as heck wouldn't be picking it up, so then what?
I think I'm done with large catfish......for now, lol.

 

[CFC]

The cup of water every few minutes technique doesnt actually help much in the acclimatisation process, true its better then just dumping the fish straight in but you are still rapidly changing the parameters of the bag water every few minutes which sort of defeats the object. This might prehaps decribe it better.
Imagine you are sitting in a bath of water, the bath is getting colder so every few minutes someone comes along and fills the bath up with about a quarter of the bath volume of hot water, you'd notice the change in temperature straight away right? But if someone were just adding 1 drop of hot water every second you probably wouldnt notice the bath getting warmer at all as your body would be slowly adjusting as the temperature rose.
This is how it is for fish in a bag of water with different parameters to those in your tank, everytime you dump that cup of water into the bag you rapidly change the parameters of the bagwater and the fish will react to it, by using the drip method the flow can be adjusted so that the changes are so gradual that the fish hardly notices the transition from soft to hard water (or vice versa) which lessens stress dramatically.