Are plastic boxes safe as quarantine tanks? and Ich questions

[Rensille]

For some reason my fish suddenly showed signs of having ich on my tank i think it was because of the stress caused from moving the tank to another room I couldn't pick up some bare tanks today because i was busy on a trip and the stores are close and tomorrow they will probably be closed since its new year so i picked up a couple of large plastic boxes and was wondering if its safe to use them as qt tanks.

I'm also new to the hobby and its the first time I had ich. I have done research and picked up a methlylene blue that i'm going to use since they say it should be safe for all types of fish both scaleless and scaled fish which i have in my tank. I don't have a heater so i'm not confident if it will work since most information i found requires a heater. should i separate the scaleless and scaleless fish when medicating them since the scaleless fish need 1/2 of the required dose? or treating them in a single container will do fine? The directions on the methylene blue is also unclear besides the required dose per gallon I do not know how much % water change i should do everyday and how long will this treatment last. I also don't know if i should use bath or dip method instead.

 

[kno4te]

Large plastic boxes are safe as long as nothing toxic was kept inside them prior would be my thinking.

As for the ich. Methylenblue wont work since ich is attached to the body. Also it’s not that effective to ich compared to other meds imo. Need to get some seachem paragaurd, Kordon ichx, or api ich cure.

 

[skjl47]

Hello; First thing I am confident about is that the tank with ick needs to be treated and not just the fish. In other words in a sense the tank itself is infected as well as the fish so a separate QT is not much needed.
Perhaps the closest to a general consensus about the treatment of ick is to raise the temperature of the water and to add a sufficient amount of salt. I will not get into this now as there are a number of threads, including stickies, on the subject. There are differing opinions about heat and salt.

Another thing I have confidence about is that any treatment will take several weeks including at least 10 days after he last ick spot is gone.

Whatever treatment method you pick stick to just one medication at a time . Do not mix medications. Kno4te has suggested some commercial medications and I tend to agree that the MB (methelyne blue) is not my first choice. Lots of threads about this on this site but some differing opinions. Do some investigation and pick a treatment, but use only one at a time is my suggestion.

 

[Exnetics]

I had the same problem with my 300 gal. I found these instructions somewhere and it worked for me, but a heater is needed.

 

[duanes]

It sometimes takes weeks, or even 2 months after adding a new fish to notice that it has carried ick into your tank. It may have had only 1 cyst, but over time that one ick cyst becomes hundreds, even thousands and should be assumed to infect every fish in the tank. This is why i quarantine all new fish for at least 2 months, before putting them in a main tank.
As Jeff said, once ick is noticed in a tank, the entire tank must be treated, ick are not only the spots on your fish, and dips are basically useless. There are dormant ick cysts in the substrate, and some in planktonic stages trying to attach to fish, and in these stages they are microscopic, so invisible.
I use 3 lbs or rock salt per 100 gallons as a treatment for ick.
I also vacuum the substrate more than the norm, because each time you discard that vacuumed water, you are tossing away the dormant cysts.
Just because you don't see spots on the fish, doesn't mean ick is gone, each spot erupts into as many as 100 new young, microscopic ick, unless you have enough osmotic pressure from salt or meds, to kill them.