Quarantine/hospital Tank

[Zachary1941]

Hi,
I have a Juwel 125 tank which i did a fishless cycle using the pinned item on here.I first added 8 Zebra Danio and 8 Harlequins (Thanks Waterdrop read that Harlequins need a mature tank, opinions on this was 50/50..however you answered one of my posts and you had them after the big water change.. good enough for you good enough for me..So went ahead and got them .. No regrets at all ..My stats have been rock solid ..0 Ammonia 0 Nitrites and vary from 5 to 10 Nitrates.. Do a 25% water change and gravel clean weekly...2 weeks after adding the first added 6 wee Endlers(Thanks Oldman your post on these convinced me .. need to have ) and 3 Albino Corys...Filter coped no problem stats same..thats it for this tank?..Now for some unknown reason lost a Zebra ...started swimming sideways and sinking to the bottom.. thought might be Swim Bladder bought meds etc and tried my damnest to save him.. but got worse until in the end was sad to see him .. so i did what i considered the best for him and put him to sleep.. sob sob..all the rest of the fish are great..This got me thinking really need a Quarintine/Hospital tank as hopefully next year will be getting a 300 litre Jewul..so more fish for that tank.(All being well ) Also will be going into plants etc......QUESTION Guys and Girls.. What size do you consider a good Size tank for a Quararine/Hospital tank...If i do get the bigger tank will still only be getting the litle guys and girls of the fish world...your advice here will be much appreciated ...Should add thanks to all the members for all there questions..saved me a lot of typing lol and of course our experts whose advice is priceless Regards Zac

 

[glolite]

Hi. A hospital tank ideally needs to be small enough that you don't have to use loads of meds (expensive) but large enough that your fish can comfortably swim around (kind). Mine is 8g. Obviously if you are into monster sized fish this wouldn't be big enough.

There is a pinned topic about hospital tanks in the Emergency section of the forums. Well worth a read.

 

[waterdrop]

I tend to think of H/Q-tanks as 10g or less (40L or less for you civilized metric folks) with the choice most often being made by whatever small goldfish tank someone had brought home years ago before they new anything serious about the hobby, lol. Ideally you keep a small sponge filter or some other small filter going in "one of your big tanks" (if you've got 20 like OM47 and some of these members, lol) or you mentally identify some subset of the mature media in your main filter that you will plan to use for the Q-tank when needed. For instance, I've always thought I'd use some of the ceramic gravel or rings from one of my cannister trays and the needed thing then is to have some fresh new biomedia on hand to mix back in to the big filter when the borrowed media is removed, so that the capacity will still be full. If a Q session turns out to not have any sick fish I suppose one could re-use that media back into the/a big filter. On the other hand if the media has gone through an H-tank session its probably a good excuse to retire that media (to the trash can) and consider the new media in the big filter to have replaced it. (Note of course my assumption about Q-tank size is that we are talking normal beginner tanks getting small or young fish.)

~~waterdrop~~