Peroxide - you guys will think I'm nuts

[asylumdown]

Originally Posted by Relect

The 3% from the drug store usually has a stabilizer added to prolong shelf life once opened. For salmon we use 200 ppm of 35% for prophylactic treatment of fungus with no harm to fish. We dilute and use immediately as once mixed with water the extra oxygen molecule leaves the solution. This also raises D.O. quite a lot.

Don't they have to add stabilizers to the 35% stuff as well? I thought H2O2 without a stabilizer present decomposes rapidly regardless of the concentration?

My bottle says the stabilizers are:
Sodium stannate
Sodium nitrate
Sodium pyrophosphate
Methylenephosphonic acid
Phosphoric acid

4 out of 5 of those would basically just add small amounts of nitrate and phosphorous to the water. Each of the phosphorous containing compounds should be bio-available, though I don't think the methylenephosphonic acid would register on the test kits we use as it's an organic compound. The bottle doesn't say what concentrations of each are in it, but assuming you've got functioning nutrient export systems in place and you're dosing relatively small amounts I doubt you'd be inadvertently adding to your problem

The one that concerns me is sodium stannate, as that has tin in it. I found this article in reef keeping that only briefly talks about tin: http://reefkeeping.com/issues/2002-0...ture/index.php

The basic gist is that no one knows anything about tin or its role in marine ecosystems, but that tin concentrations in aquarium are already 200,000 times higher than natural sea water.

So that's definitely something to think about. Now that I've read this I think I'd be a little more comfortable with dosing peroxide if I could find a brand that did not have sodium stannate as a stabilizer, but I don't know if such a thing exists or not?