Chemiclean half dose?

[richiev]

I have stepped up to trying chemiclean in my cyano fight. I vacuumed almost all of it again, did a water change, and started mixing it. I then realized I only have approximately half a dose.

Should I use it or should I dump it and only do the full dose? My understanding is it's an antibiotic, so I'm pretty leery of doing a partial dose, but not sure in this situation.

My assumption is I shouldn't use it, and I should pour some bleach or something in the mix I have before dumping it. I already ordered more.

CC @JVU who seems like someone who'd have an informed opinion.

 

[Turkeysammich]

Just wait until tomorrow. Go to the fish store and buy some more. Then full dose. Don’t half guess it. You don’t gotta dump it either. Dose tomorrow

 

[JVU]

Sorry just seeing this. My understanding is that Chemiclean is erythromycin. I agree with your feelings of caution about half-dosing antibiotics in general when treating infections, but this use case is a little different, and quite frankly we don’t know what the “right” dose is for treating cyano like we do for antibiotics in human/veterinary medicine where we have real data. In this use I don’t think it’s risky to give a half dose. I would just dose what you made up, and buy more asap and add the amount needed to make it a regular dose.

As far as the bleaching of antibiotics in solution to make them safer to dispose of… people have strong opinions about that but I haven’t seen science to back it up. There isn’t great data about inactivation of every specific type of antibiotic out there with bleach treatment and no generic reason to think that it would necessarily inactivate them without data to show it. In fact there is some data to suggest chlorine treatment (aka bleach) in water treatment facilities doesn’t necessarily deactivate some common antibiotics, since they remain an issue in the water supply. Bleach is great at indiscriminately killing living things and inactivating the organic molecules that produce color, but that’s not the same as inactivating antibiotics molecules.