Advice needed.. First Ick experience

Hello!
Let me start by saying thank you. I have stalked this forum for about a year now, gathering all kinds of information to help me in fish keeping. This is my first post but you all have no idea just how vital you all have been in my fish keeping efforts.

I have a 50 gallon, freshwater tank. I use the API master test kit to get the following readings:
pH: 7.8
Ammonia: 0
Nitrite: 0
Nitrate: 5

My tank has 2 black shirt tetras, 1 angel fish, 1 dwarf gourami, and 6 tiger barbs. The tiger barbs are new, and as I recently learned, not a great fit for this tank.

I get all of my fish from Petsmart, as the closest freshwater fish store is an hour and a half away. The people at Petsmart told me that the large black skirt tetras are semi-aggressive and would be fine with the barbs. I have since learned that's not true. Now my tetras have ick. I imagine because they are stressed from the barbs.

I am treating the tank with Marineland Ick treatment. I have the temp up at 85 degrees and I'm doing the daily 25% water changes before treatments.

So the questions:
How long do I treat the tank after the spots are gone?
Will the treatment mess up the nitrogen cycle?
Is there anything I'm not doing that I should be doing?

To reduce stress to the tetras I've put in a tank divider to keep the barbs away from them. I also have a 55 gallon community tank that I would like to move the tetras to, once the ick is gone. I just don't want to move them too soon and infect the other tank.

Any advice would be most appreciated!

 

Hi, I would treat the ich (same thing, different name, don't judge me) for at least two weeks, even a month. Make sure there's no carbon or anything else like that in the filter, otherwise the medicine would just get absorbed.

Also, it won't affect the nitrogen cycle one bit.

 

Not sure of the marineland meds, but I used the heat treatment for 16 days, Supposed to go for two weeks, I kept it up for two additional days just in case. I used heat only, and it worked great, ICH free for over 6 weeks. My Pleco still had spots about halfway through treatment, but they disappeared on the 8th day. I was told only two weeks of heat was necessary, not starting from the time when he lost the spots, but from when I turned up the temp.
Be sure to do lots of water changes and vacuum the gravel well to get rid of it from the water column

 

I have used Kordon's rid ich plus medication successfully in the past. I have not had issues with ich for a long time now. A downside of the medications is that many of them use a blue dye that will clear up after a few minutes in your water, but can stain items in the tank. In my case it stained some airline tubing.

This guys videos have helped me quite a bit on a number of aquarium topics.

 

Another medication to consider (if you don't have inverts) is Cupramine. I've used both it and Rid Ich and now go to the Cupramine first.