What's your coral dipping and acclimation method?

[taylormaximus]

Hi! This will be my first time posting in the coral threads as I currently run a fish only system, but I'm planning on introducing some coral soon. I've been doing loads of research on coral dips, so I thought I would ask what dip (or series of dips) you use to feel confident adding a new frag to your tank? And what pests does your protocol remove effectively, and what pests does it not?

And along with that, what procedure do you have for acclimating the frags to your tank? Like do you still QT it for a period of time or add it directly to your tank? And then what's your procedure for adding it to your system? I think my biggest acclimation question is in regards to light. I heard that you're supposed to ramp up your lights over a period of time to avoid shock. How important is this? And how do you realistically do that when you already have coral in your system? I feel like that lighting change would shock the coral already in the system more than it would the new frag.

Also just a bit of info about my plans for coral, I have a 32G system, and I'm planning on adding some fairly basic corals, primarily softies, but I'm definitely planning for some euphyllia as well, probably torches and hammers. And I haven't gotten any dips yet, but from what I've read Coral Rx, Lugols and H2O2 seem promising.

Sorry this is quite a number of questions that maybe should be split into separate posts, but it's all generally about preparing new frags for your system, so I though it was okay. So any advice you have about that general topic would be great!

 

[shakacuz]

i temp acclimate the bags/containers in my sump for about 15 minutes or so then dump it all into a large bowl where i inspect for pests. i then move to another container to dip with;

food grade potassium chloride at a 10g per 1 liter ratio for about 10 minutes. or polyp lab "reef primer" at their instructed dose. they're essentially the same thing. i also have "exodus dip" on hand from reef moonshiner @PSXerholic.


i use a turkey baster to gently blow the corals attempting to unroot anything then depending if the coral is encrusted onto the plug, i tend to remove the old plug and glue onto a new plug to avoid any nuisance algae from appearing as i previously had bryopsis come into my tank because i didn't do the frag plug swap.