How long do I have to wait.....

[mindy0368]

My fish have all died of ick even though I've treated my tank and increased the temp in the tank.

My question is this..... how long do I have to wait before buying another fish to put in the aquarium? Also I have a five gallon aquarium....how many mollies or platties can I put in it. I would say 4 or 5 (one fish per gallon is what I was always told, but they're small?).

I don't know if now I have to cycle my tank again if I have fish out of it for more than a couple days?

Also, I've been told our tap water is really bad. I want to add a water softener, but will that hurt the fish? I know I have to declorinate the water, but what will the softened water do to them? Can I just buy the bottled spring water (not distilled).

I've never bothered with all this before, lol, just put in the ole tap water, and the fish, and they all lived. Guess I was just lucky. Now that I've had this experience and watched them all suffer, I don't want to do anything wrong!

 

[Lithril]

Unless you're going to keep really sensitive fish then I wouldn't start playing with water hardness, most fish are fairly adaptable. If you do want to use clean water then a lot of lfs will sell RO water for around 50p a gallon and you'll just need to add the minerals back into the water to get the conditions you need.

What temperature have you increased the tank to? It needs to be at least 82 to get rid of ich, if there is no fish in there probably 84 would be good.

I think I read on one of the previous posts that ich can't survive without a host for longer than 2 weeks so if you leave the tank this time you should be fine. If you want to make sure the tank doesn't need a recycle you can either add ammonia to it or just add some fish food each day.