Just read up on TT and sounds promising and looks like I am going to need to get some smaller tanks, 40b's would be too big for the amount of water changes, the salt would be quite costly and what I have left for fish is a small 2" longhorn cow fish and a small yellow tang so 40 gallons would be so overkill I have some cichlids growing out in a 20 gallon so I think I will move them to one of the 40's and use the 29 they are in now and the 20 for TT unless I can come across a cheap 20 gallon to just have 2, 20's
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Sad part of all this is not sure I will be able to keep the yellow tang, I have heard they need to be the last fish added to a tank and he would basically be the first when this is all done. I will either need to maintain him in a separate tank for months while I populate my tank or rehome until ready to add tangs back in.
I am in the planning stages of moving my 55 Sump into basement and adding a 90 gallon tank inline for LiveRock and extra volume plus thinking being in the basement will help with keeping the 180DT cool in the summer so maybe I will just put the yellow tang in there we'll see. Just means I need to step up my game and get this going sooner rather than later.
I'm a newbie at this, so take my experience/advice with a grain of salt (or grain of ich! ha ha). However, I'm a voracious reader, and mostly lurk, but find there is a tremendous amount of great info on this and other boards. You often have to sort through the clutter, but generally can find a consenus of what will have the best chance of working for you from experienced fellow hobbyists.
I went through an ich outbreak and chose to go the hyposalinity route. I don't have the dates in front of me, but I recall I started in early January and my easy goal that my DT would be fully stocked by Easter so I could proudly display my new venture at Easter as I was hosting the family get together. Didn't make it! It was so disappointing every time I thought I could start the final count down clock and then a few days later I'd see one of my fish with a single or only a couple of white spots. Took a couple of months to where I was ich free and could start raising the salinity level back to normal.
Research has shown that of the many varieties of ich, several have been found resistant to hyposalinity. However, I believe these were specifically found off the coast of Taiwan, and the chances or having one of these probably remote.
My theory (and this is only my theory) is that the ich seems to survive longer than expected because in practice hyposalinity is not killing the all the ich every time the tomites hatch. When I dropped my salinity, for the first couple of days I noticed the SG would slightly increase the next day. I assumed this was because it took the several gallons of high SG water in the sand bed a while to equilibrate with hypo conditions. LR is also highly porous, and it would also take a while for this to equilibrate, I think much longer than the sand. For example, I've read you shouldn't use copper in a DT with LR, as the LR will continue to leach copper for a long, long time.
My theory (again only a theory) is that as the fish sleep in, or next to the LR (mine did), when the tomites hatch near where the fish sleep; 1) right at the rock the SG may be slightly higher as the LR is 'oozing' higher SG water; 2) the theront finds a host right away to attach to, so it is not exposed to hyposalinity long enough to kill it.
Bottom line is hypo treatment is probably going to work, it just is going to take longer than you expect. My DT includes a blue hippo (often referred to as an ich-magnet), but I have been ich free since I ended hypo. Like many things in this hobby, you might just need to give it more time.
