This week I got a rather large shipment of fish corals and invertes from bluezooaquatics, and had one hell of a time keeping the water in my acclimation containers warm. Because of this the Fromia star I got is going to die.

Anyone have some good ways of keeping the water warm? I had to keep stopping the drip and re-floating the container every half hour to keep water temps up, but before I realized this I had let the water in my invert container get down to like 73 Degrees (we keep the house at 71 in the winter).

I have normally bought stuff during the summer when our house is like 78 degrees, and this was never a problem, so I never thought about it untill it was too late.

At least everything else made it.

I float a container in the sump and drip from the tank into it. I'm usually only doing a critter or two at a time so I don't need a large container.

you could likely put them all together into a container assuming they came from the same place, then put a small heater in the drip container.

Yeah my sump is way to cramped to fit anything, I tried.

I seperated everything...iverts in one, corals in another, and fish in the last then ran three seperate drip lines with different drip rates.

After about a half an hor the temps got too low, so I had to stop and then re-float then repeat untill everything was good.

Where could I get a heater that is whicked small?

I am not buying anything for a while, and probably never this much at a time again, but I just want to be better prepared. I had to pull the star our today because it was starting to fall apart.:sad: :sad:

Honestly with the exception of inverts, I dont drip. I see no reason and simply put the fish/coral in a container, then add about a cup of tank water, then add a little more a few minutes later (after floating of course) and pop them in. I had one boss who was a drip nazi. When we dripped, we lost twice as many fish and corals as when we just did a float, parasite dip and into the system. I think it is due to the fact that the fish/coral was going through three sets of changes as opposed to on slightly more drastic one in which it could adapt to. I saw some fish just give up after hitting the main system because the drip stressed them so much. My advice is to pick up some small heaters for 10-20 g tanks and use them for sw mixing and dripping inverts.

walmart has 3-5g heaters for like 10 bucks. Thats what I use in my water change prep bucket.

I usually do a very fast drip for fish...like 4-5 drips per second, about 3 drops per second for corals, and about 2 for inverts.

I usually have the fish in the tank in about a half an hour after the float, corals about 40 min, and inverts about two hours.

Cool, well at least no-one has this well known secret way of acclimating that I never heard about. Guess I will just be more careful, and use my mixing heater next time, just need a container big enough.

walmart has 3-5g heaters for like 10 bucks. Thats what I use in my water change prep bucket.


Cool thanks.

I have a 50W heater I use for SW mixing, I may use that or try to find something smaller.

Nah man acclimation is a very tricky thing, thats why I abandoned it after the guy who spoke from the coral prop facility in Alabama (I THINK his name was Chris but I dont remember) at the meeting said not to acclimate fish or corals.

Hmm, Well I guess I will just drip inverts from now on. It is such a PITA anyway! Come to think of it, I never lost anything when I just added 2 cups of tank water over a period of time back in the day.

The only things I have killed during acclimation are inverts! **** yous inverts!

whoops, I promise that was not a "Bad" 4 letter word...

I got 25 pepps to try to help with my aiptasia issue and never acclimated them. I never saw any bodies floating around and see atleast a dozen each night out roaming.

I know of a particular sponsor that doesn't acclimate ANYTHING; he just floats the bag for 20 mins. and in ya go! He says that the travel is enough stress and the animal is already stressed out--he says before he'd lose 1/3 of stuff while acclimating, now he may lose 1 out of the entire shipment!

very interesting!

How do you drip acclimate?!

I never drip any corals just float and put in tank. For fish i just add a little water 3 times over a 10 min period and they go in.