Hi, I would like to share my fight against velvet disease in my high tech planted tank.

I hope you already read about velvet disease to keep this as short as possible.

Setup : Tank is a 250litre
Equipment : Lights I custom with LED and dose with APT zero using a dosing pump, both on timers. Using a Chiller set at 24C and Eheim canister filter. Using a cheap surface skimmer pump. Co2 dosing using pressurized cylinder and normal ceramic diffuser.
Flora : heavily planted with buceps, nanas, mini pellia and many other rare plants with lava stones and driftwoods.
Fauna : Oto (x6), Golden algae (x2), SAE(x2), various Cory species (x10), a pair of Kuhli loach, a few assasin snails, Bluegrass guppies (many), Cherry shrimps (100+) and CRS (20+).

The velvet disease was introduce when I put in a pair of Golden cobra guppy without quarantine. Yes my fault as I thought expensive hybrid fish already comes from disease free environment.

Before this addition, I already had a large colony of Bluegrass guppy breeding like crazy, the intent to add the pair is to try some cross breeding.

The male golden cobra guppy looks tired and do not respond to food like the female. After few days it died followed by other guppies rubbing and flashing. Some even look skinny, when few days before their bellies where round. Not interested to eat. I knew something is wrong and found out it was velvet disease .

All available meds and remedy in LFS/Internet will result in killing my plants or shrimp. I was a lost and dig deeper in various websites until 1 site talk about using hydrogen peroxide but it was in a marine tank.

Gave it a try, initial 100ppm every 12hrs for 3 days. Actually within 24hrs, 80% recovered. After 3 days, I lowered dose to 50ppm every 12hrs for another 4 days. Velvet disease parasite have a 4-5 day life cycle. Only casualties are the female golden cobra and 2 adult female bluegrass guppy. No other fish or shrimp died.

It also helps to kill any bba or other algae in my tank. My filter beneficial bacteria took a slight beating but ok.

So hydrogen peroxide sold a Guardian or Watson is a must stock item for my tank.

Thanks for reading.