Originally Posted by
Fretfreak13
http:///forum/post/3135948
SCSI: I'm not THAT worried about the LR and LS. If I do end up killing it, I an reseed it afterwards, right? I'm slow at adding fish, so there's plenty of time for another cycle in there. I'd move my litter inverts to my sump or DT, if I had to medicate in that tank.
Flower: I can do that too, actually. xP I only have a billion and a half ten gallons sitting around.
Breaking down an sanitizing a QT is par for the course after each time you use it.
I disagree with the notion that QT and HT are two separate things. I suppose they CAN be, but in most cases, they are one in the same. Having two separate tanks is ultimately harder on the fish, on your wallet, and on your time and energy.
What I'm saying is... the whole point of a QT is a place where you can identify issues that require treatment... so if you find that a fish requires treatment, are you going to want to subject him to the stresses of removing him and re-acclimating him to an HT, just to do a treatment on him?
The whole point of a QT is a location to place fish for observation, where you are prepared to do treatment if it becomes necessary. You're flirting with disaster if you routinely expect a fish to survive the stresses of being transferred to another tank once it becomes clear that he's sick.
Standard operating procedures call for quarantine tanks to be completely torn down and sanitized after each use, to prevent anything that was on the fish from being transferred to the tank's "next customer." You can't do that with an aquascaped QT. Ultimately, an aquascaped QT is only useful up until a fish you QT turns out to be sick. Then it becomes a nightmare.
So I'm going to stick by my original position, that a QT and HT are best being the same functional setup. A QT set up as a display tank is just another display tank, not a QT.