How should i move him?

[fishboy]

Hmm... now i had to move my discus to another tank, just read the title "Ugh" and you will find out why. Anyway now i am gonna move him back in a few days so my question is how? I was thinking drip method. I understand you put the fish in a bucket then drip water in there over a period of a hour. So how has this worked for everybody? Any other comments on your way of acclimating your fish?


Thanks,
Daniel

 

[colesea]

Drip method requires several things:

1) 2 buckets (or sm sweater boxes)
2) Airline hose
3) 1 large sweater box (or whatever to catch overflow)
4) paper-clips
5) Gravity

Drip acclimation relies on gravity to create siphon action through a hose from a bucket of higher elevation to a bucket of lower elevation. The rate of drip can be controled by kinking the hose. The system I used to use at the lab I jury-rigged with sweater boxes, but anything that will hold about 5 gallons of water is pretty good. I would place the water I wanted to acclimate to on a high shelf, place my fish in a bucket of their regular water on the lower shelf, then run a gravity-siphon between the two buckets using airline tubbing. I would use the paper-clips to kink the hose so that the flow rate would utilize 5 gallons over a 24hr period (this you begin to recognize after doing it for so long). The fish bucket had a drilled overflow spout which would drain into a sweater box on the floor.

That's pretty much the gist of it. The object is to replace the existing water with the new water over a specific period of time so that mixing occures between the two and allows the fish to slowly adapt to the new conditions. Any materials you find that can accomplish this can be used to create a drip system.
~~Colesea

 

[wayne]

How different are your water conditions between tanks? How big is the discus? For a small (up to 12 cms) fish I tick them in a litre yoghurt pot with some original water, and float it in the new tank. Tht equalises water. I also add bits (not very scientific I'm afraid ) of new water to progressively equalise water chemistry. For a sturdy fish, give it 15 mins, for a discus 30. At the end, net out and move the fish, dump the old water. This seems to work ok for my fish.
If you're going to change pH by more than .5, you're looking at a couple of days to do it safely - I've never hadto do this. For bigger fish, they go in a bucket, and I dump in 1/2 litres of fresh tank water, one every 10 minutes for 40 minutes.

 

[RedTurquoise]

I always use the drip method when ever receiving fish or changing tanks. Takes around 1-2 hours and I use a 5G bucket with airline tubes/air valves. Initial water level in the 5G is maybe 6". I siphon directly from the tank (you can see more in my yahoo album under the discus folder) and once full I net the fish. I think it is a much better way to climatize then the float/fill/wait method from experience (fish seem to 'recove' much quicker).

When climatizing to large water parameters differences, I usually slow the drip so it will take around 4-5 hours to fill the 5G bucket! However, I also add a heater! I would not recommend doing it any longer than 5 hours, never mind a couple of days because then your looking at having to add filteration, aertion, heating! The only time I would take longer than 5 hours to climatize is if the ph is quite a bit lower than the tank (more than 0.5)!