How do you keep acclimation container warm?

[rostato]

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.

 

[gwhiz]

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.

 

[stickx911]

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.

 

[rostato]

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:

 

[stickx911]

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

 

[rostato]

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.

 

[rostato]

stickx911;252050 wrote: 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.

 

[rostato]

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!

 

[rostato]

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

 

[ericmcj31]

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!

 

[rostato]

very interesting!

 

[steve]

How do you drip acclimate?!

 

[markl]

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.