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FW dips


erich_9175

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Hello. I wanted to do FW dips for the corals which I will be getting this weekend. Unfortunately Lugol is not available where I live. Can I use any other brand? Or better if somebody could give me the active ingredients of Logul so that I could check out the locally available brands if they are similar.

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SaltWaterNewb

The ingredients are:

 

deionized water

potassium iodide

iodine

 

I ordered mine from Dr. Fosters.

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the main active ingredient in Lugol's is iodine, I-. it's very toxic and reactive. it's reactive to the point of being unstable actually, i.e. if you left the top off the bottle or put it into a clear bottle (light) it would combine out to some iodate compound or something similar.

 

you can order it online thru some health stores or thru some of the ols at 4x the price. used correctly it's used for thyroid treatment, i believe.

 

you can't really mix the KI type and get the same results. it's like comparing calcium tablets with a block of calcium metal (also very reactive in its pure state).

 

but kent's Tech I seems to be (imo) some kind of mixture of I- and iodate compounds (chelated form? whatever that means :P ). it seems to be almost as effective as lugol's when used in a similar fashion. but i'm not a coral dipper in general anyways, except for radical/emergency situation. hth

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You can also use Seachem's Reef Dip, which is iodine based and has dipping instructions on the bottle.

 

Tropic Marin also has a dip that I've heard good things about, but haven't tried myself.

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Bear in mind that a Lugol's dip and a freshwater dip are not the same thing. You can use Lugol's in either sw or fw. I generally do mine in fw as a kind of double-whammy, but some more sensitive corals will take a Lugol's where they wouldn't handle a fw dip as well. Case in point, we had a huge clump of palys that we did a fw dip on and they got so irritated they nuked several other corals. (Had no clue they reacted like that, or I would have gone for just a Lugol's instead.)

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Palys don't handle FW dips as well as zoanthids or some other corals do.

They tend to blister up.

I usually only FW dip palys for 2 mins, and only when necessary.

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Thanks a lot guys!! I think ill just make do with FW only dip right now. Better safe than sorry. I'll see if i can order online (i think shipping charges will be one more than 5X the actual product price) since I am currently working in Dubai. Lets just see.

 

Lets just hope that i dont need to use this treatment in the future..

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I have gotten 2 orders of zoas/palys lately. My first order had a zoanthid spider, crab and bristle worms (I know many people like these). I'm glad I dipped cause that spider was nasty! Everything survived

 

My second order from another vendor was great with nothing on it but the palys tissue blistered a bit after the dip. So its hard to know when to dip and when not to. You don't want pests but you don't want to lose any corals either.

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