setting up a quarantine or hospital tank

hI I've been reading on here about setting up a qt or hospital tank and I've read you just need a tank, filter and heater, fill it with water from your tank, and start everything up then acclimate the fish. would you be doing daily water changes then? or set it up and cycle it and always have an empty cycled tank around???? if you just want to qt new fish you would have time to set up and cycle it I suppose, but if a fish gets sick...would you just set it up and use stability or something? how does this work? what is the best way to go about setting up or keeping a qt tank? thank you

 

following, also interested

 

I'm not sure what everyone else does but I usually cram extra media into my existing filter to grow some extra BB that way if I need another tank, I can just pull from my stash of extra media and borrow some substrate from the established tank to cycle the QT in a hurry.

 

^^ Lchi87's method is exactly what you can do when you want to set up a QT or hospital tank. If you have a second filter on your display tank (smaller HOB or sponge filters are great for this purpose!), you can also move that over to the QT for an instant cycle.

 

thank you I hadn't considered that but I guess I could put the sponge from my qt filter into the other tank so it's always ready and waiting lol