API Melafix contains tea tree oil that will help your fish recover from open wounds, abrasions, and fin rot. This product should also help treat eye cloud, mouth fungus and other bacterial infections.
If you overdose this water treatment in your fish tank, however, then it may end up causing issues.
To see what you can do if you accidentally added too much Melafix, you can check out this troubleshooting guide at Aquarium Blueprints.
How to avoid overdosing your fish tank with API Melafix
To avoid overdosing Melafix in your fish tank, make sure you follow the official directions.
According API, you should add 5 mL of Melafix for every 10 gallons, or 40 liters, in your aquarium.
How to tell if you overdose Melafix
The behavior of your fish will tell whether or not you overdosed API Melafix in your aquarium. You should look for the following symptoms of stress:
- Grasping for air at the water surface.
- Head or body twitching.
- Sudden darting around the tank.
How to fix a fish tank that has been overdosed with Melafix
In order to make your aquarium safe again after overdosing it with API Melafix, we recommend that you take the following steps:
1. If only some of your pet fish is twitching and/or darting around the tank, then you may want to consider moving them into a temporary tank or container with sutiable water as soon as possible.
2. In order to dilute the Melafix overdose, you need to do a water change. Start by taking water out of your fish tank.
Try to remove as much of the tank water based on how much you overdosed. For example, if you added Melafix by twice the recommended amount, then you need to remove 50% in order to dilute the concertation back to the recommended level.
If you don’t know how much Melafix that you overdosed into the tank water, then you can take out as much water as you can.
3. Next, you need to add new water back into your fish tank as doing so will help dilute the Melafix to make it safer for the inhabitants living in your fish tank.
If you are using tap water, we recommend adding a water conditioner, such as Seachem Prime, to remove chlorine and chloramine. Otherwise, these two chemical compounds will harm the beneficial bacteria living inside the fish tank and fish tank filter.
For the water conditioner, we recommend adding it directly into your aquarium. You should also dose based on how much water your tank is capable of holding.
4. After completing a water change, observe you fish to see if they are still showing signs of stress. If they are still stressing out, then you can try doing another water change.
5. You may also want to consider adding carbon to help remove Melafix from your tank water.
6. Once the fish in your tank appear to be settling down, you should be able to safely put back in any of the fish that you moved to a temporary housing from Step #1.
