Newbie Help Needed Please

[patchouli]

Hi all, we have just started in fish keeping.

We were given a tropical tank by a friend who decided it was way too hard for her to upkeep. Once we got the tank up and running we realised some of the fish had whitespot. We did a lot of reading up and checking and decided to go down the Waterlife Protozin route. We initially lost a few fish but the rest now look clear of whitspot and seem to be doing ok.

I have a few questions though. We have just finished the course of treatment (treat on days 1,2,3 &6) after removing the carbon from the filter. It is roughly a 60L tank. The water is VERY murky and we wanted to know when it would be safe to do a water change and vacume the gravel.

We also bought a new tank 450L (I am soooo excited!!) that is cycling. We were also wondering, with reference to the whitespot, when it would be safe to transfer some fish over? I really don't want to do anything that might cause whitespot in the new tank if possible.
Thank you in advance

 

[fluttermoth]

As long as the full course of treatment has been completed, you can do a water change. If you ever have to water change in the middle of a course, you have to redose the medicine to the correct level in the new water.

The cycle of the whitespot parasite is around seven days, depending on temperature, so if the fish are free of spots after ten days or so (to be on the safe side), they'll be fine to move to the new tank without infecting that too. How are you cycling the new tank? Are you adding ammonia, or just letting it run?

to the forum, btw

 

[patchouli]

Thank you for your reply.

We were going to do a fish cycle with the tank, as we did with the small tank (this was forced upon us as the previous owner brought fish in bags with a fully cleaned out tank and filters etc! We cycled with fish and it went really well. We spoke to a guy at our local Aquatics shop (which also runs a local Aquarist Society) and he said to do a fish cycle again.

At the moment we have the tank ready (Ph etc)and today used Nutrafin to start the treatment.....hope this is right, like I said we were kinda forced into fish keeping but are really enjoying it...don't know why we didn't start sooner!

 

[fluttermoth]

If you're going to do a fish in cycle, you'll need to get yourself a set of decent, liquid or tablet based, test kits, if you don't have them already.

If you're moving some, or all, of the fish from the smaller tank into the larger one, you can always move some of the current filter media to the filter in the new tank