PlanetCatfish.com

Thanks Viktor for the in depth replies, information and time you spent trying to help.
It's much appreciated, I will work out what i will do and keep you all up to date on my progress with it.

Macrae

My suggestion for anyone using PP as a treatment is to put a small sample of the origional treatment water in a clear vial or plastic bag before you start adding fish. It will go a brown colour as organic load reduces the PP strength and purple hue fades so you will need to add more PP as time goes by except it is extremely difficult and very subjective to know how much PP to keep adding. So keeping a small origional sample to aim for will save you a lot of guesswork and anxiety.

Second suggestion is to use a microscope. Even a cheap plastic ebay version or a USB electronic one that plugs into a laptop may be sufficient. Without a microscope you are just guessing what parasite you are trying to kill and whether you have succeeded.

A couple of months ago, I had a bad dactylogyrus fluke outbreak on Sutchi catfish (ID sharks). Confirmed with a microscope and a gill snipe. While I had the masses of live flukes on the slide, I added PP to the slide to see how effective and it was utterly useless. Even after 24 hours and triple the PP dose, they were still alive. A 3% salt solution killed them all after 7 minutes. So I used a 15 minute salt bath and repeated a week later.

Copper is also better than PP in my opinion. But use a microscope with whatever treatment you try.

Great advice.

I use salt too (coupled with the PP or not) but rather blindly, that is without the microscope. What aquaholic does is the right way.