-In my experience, you should never dip your corals immediately after they are shipped. The shipping process is very stressful for the corals already and then if you add a dip to that process you are creating the potential for loss or a severely damaged coral that could take months to recover, let alone start thriving. Please see my temp quarantine practice and my home made dip recipe below.

-I highly recommend a QT system or at the very minimum a small tank that you can quickly set up and take down. My practice involves a 5 gallon tank that only gets used to temporarily house new arrivals. I have a heater with a built in thermostat, a nano powerhead for flow and a back up AI Prime HD for soft light. I will pull 4 gallons of water from my main SPS system to put in the temp tank. I then open the new arrivals and check their temperature with a temp gun. You want the arrival temp to be under 78 degrees. If its higher than that, the corals likely got too hot in transit and are going to be highly stressed. I then float the bags to bring them up to tank temp. While the bags are floating, I pull some rock rubble from my sump and add it to the temp tank so that the tank doesn’t try to cycle. It really shouldn’t since you aren’t feeding the tank food but I do this just to be safe. I then open the bags and place the new corals on a frag rack in the temp tank. I will inspect and monitor the corals and plugs for pest critters, aiptasia, eggs, etc over the next 24-48 hours. When I am confident the corals can handle the dip, I will then dip the corals in my home made Bayer (now Bio Advance) recipe. See below for my dipping practice and my pre-introduction practice before the corals go into my main system.