Hello; I still have the box and one powder packet of E.M. ERYTHROMYCIN by API. A box of ten powder packets cost $13.99 a few years ago at an area fish shop.
The directions suggest one packet for each ten gallons of water on day one followed by the same dose a day later. Then do a WC (25%) and repeat the two day dose again. So that would be a total of four packets for each ten gallons. At the time I had 110 gallons of infected tanks but lets stick with 100 gallons to make the math more straight forward.
By my count I would have needed forty (40) packets to treat 100 gallons at the suggested dose. So at $13.99 for ten packets that would be around $56 plus tax. I bought my EM sometime prior to 2017 so the price may be more now. So not an extraordinary expense if indeed it did work the first time, which it did not for me.
Let me here concede that I may be off in terms of the cost one way or another and also am not trying to make a big deal out of the cost. For some of us a cost ten times as much is not a problem. For others the cost may be a factor. To me it was more that such use was not long term effective and there was the risk of killing off the bb.
The infected tanks were heavily planted with a deep substrate. May have made a difference as to why the treatment failed. I may have made some other fundamental error. At any rate after two or three tries I became concerned about the other risk of creating a strain resistant to EM. I came up with another approach.
Things may have changed in the last years but I was able to buy the EM over the counter a few years ago in the USA. I have not checked to see if fish shops still offer the stuff.
Should I have the cyanobacter algae again I will try the RID-X first thing. I hope for the OP's sake RID -X does work since my method is a lot of trouble. It will also be good to have an alternative.
The directions suggest one packet for each ten gallons of water on day one followed by the same dose a day later. Then do a WC (25%) and repeat the two day dose again. So that would be a total of four packets for each ten gallons. At the time I had 110 gallons of infected tanks but lets stick with 100 gallons to make the math more straight forward.
By my count I would have needed forty (40) packets to treat 100 gallons at the suggested dose. So at $13.99 for ten packets that would be around $56 plus tax. I bought my EM sometime prior to 2017 so the price may be more now. So not an extraordinary expense if indeed it did work the first time, which it did not for me.
Let me here concede that I may be off in terms of the cost one way or another and also am not trying to make a big deal out of the cost. For some of us a cost ten times as much is not a problem. For others the cost may be a factor. To me it was more that such use was not long term effective and there was the risk of killing off the bb.
The infected tanks were heavily planted with a deep substrate. May have made a difference as to why the treatment failed. I may have made some other fundamental error. At any rate after two or three tries I became concerned about the other risk of creating a strain resistant to EM. I came up with another approach.
Things may have changed in the last years but I was able to buy the EM over the counter a few years ago in the USA. I have not checked to see if fish shops still offer the stuff.
Should I have the cyanobacter algae again I will try the RID-X first thing. I hope for the OP's sake RID -X does work since my method is a lot of trouble. It will also be good to have an alternative.
