Potassim Permanganate

[DonMD]

Another thing about PP: If you use a water conditioner such as Prime, or another, that will deactivate the PP very quickly.

[David Rose]

There seems to be mixed schools of thought as to whether you should turn off your filtration or leave it on. I can only say that my filters are well established and I've never had PP destroy my bio-filter; however, I've never needed to treat multiple times consecutively.

[nc0gnet0]

There seems to be mixed schools of thought as to whether you should turn off your filtration or leave it on. I can only say that my filters are well established and I've never had PP destroy my bio-filter; however, I've never needed to treat multiple times consecutively.

If I were to ponder a guess, I would say what type of filter you have could make a difference as well. I can see free swimming flukes and eggs getting sucked into a powered canister filter and getting embedded deeper into the substrate than say a typical sponge filter.

One has to remember that PP is an oxidizer and not a medicine, it reacts with all organic material it encounters (bacteria, dissolved organics, fish poop, fish slime coat, parasites, etc etc.) This being said, if bacteria that resides in your filter is left untouched, how effective was the treatment at eradicating the flukes themselves, which are a more complex organism and require a longer contact time than the bacteria?

I am not saying that it isn't possible for a PP treatment to be succesfull without total elimination of the beneficial bacteria, but you are running a risk of failure. This can be partial negated by a treatment schedule of consequtive doses over multiple days, with the goal of eliminating the flukes that exist on the fish, and catching the remaining bugs in subsequent treatments.

Another user in this thread listed a link to a good read:

www.click2roark.com

While geared towards koi, this guy knows his stuff and is one of the pioneers of PP use. The trick is the best way to modify his treatment schedule while bearing in mind that while the bug we are dealing with is the same, seeing how we keep Discus in temperatures that are typically 10+ degrees higher than that of koi, the fluke life cycle itself is different.

[Jhhnn]

PP is available from several ebay vendors, which is where I got mine-

http://shop.ebay.com/?_from=R40&_trk...All-Categories

Gram scales from several vendors like this one-

http://www.gramscales.com/product_in...oducts_id=1895

It's the scale I have, works well in my light duty situation.

This topic is discussed often. My own experience and methods I offered here-

http://forum.simplydiscus.com/showpo...0&postcount=10

Dunno that I'd go to 4ppm- the fish aren't happy at all in a 2ppm bath, which is the most widely recommended dose. They're not horribly stressed, either... To my eyes, 2ppm is rosy pink, not light pink...

[kaceyo]

If you clean your filters well, wipe the inside of tank down and then do a large wc BEFORE doing the treatment, you should be able to keep the pp active for 4 hrs or even a bit longer (by redosing once) with the filters in the tank and running.
I've never had a bio-filter killed off by a 2ppm pp treatment, only set back a little, and it's back to normal within a couple of days.

[roundfishross]

If the filtration is removed then any living parasites in the filter get to live. Proper treatment requires removal of the filter material and subsequent sterilization of the filter.

I have seen well established pond filters make it through a 4 hour PP treatment, but I don't see this happening in an aquarium environment. The protocal I use for dosing a pond requires 4 treatments over the course of 8 days.

of course the filter and media needs to be cleaned aside from the treatment in your tank