:thumbup:

 

Good Luck Earl! Let the carbon dosing adventure begin! :thumbup:

Good luck Earl. Carbon dosing can turn into an addiction because of just how well it works! Make sure to post up some pictures of the increased quality of your skimmate.

Thanks for the support fellas!
This is pre-carbon dosing, about five days.

And just for reference, here is a recent FTS.

 

Good Luck Earl! Let the carbon dosing adventure begin! :thumbup:

 

Good luck Earl. Carbon dosing can turn into an addiction because of just how well it works! Make sure to post up some pictures of the increased quality of your skimmate.

 

They do look fat and happy, I'll be following along

 

Your tank looks so beautiful I am surprised you are dosing.

Following along

 

opcorn: Should be interesting to watch your progress. Hope it goes well for you.

 

Thanks all.
Trish, I'm happy with the tank but I think it could be better. I like experimenting too:nuts:

 

Mine could definitely be better. So, I am hoping that the vinegar works well for you. The cyano keeps me from doing vodka again.

 

Trish, vodka has been well known to promote the growth of cyano is there are existing detectable inorganic phosphate levels in the tank. Carbon dosing is also well known to remove nitrate and phosphate unproportionate to one another. It is highly recommended to utilize GFO when carbon dosing to reduce nutrients. Even beautiful tanks like Earl's can benefit from carbon dosing because it decreases available inorganic nutrients to levels usually not attainable otherwise, allowing you to feed more.

 

Very nice tank. That Toadstool is amazing. How old is is and does it drip offspring [reproduce]??

Have fun with your project. Your thread title got me to using vinegar to clean a couple powerheads.

 

Very nice tank. That Toadstool is amazing. How old is is and does it drip offspring [reproduce]??

Thank you. I've had the toad for 2 1/2-3 years. It's grown significantly in that time. It dropped three babies about a year or so ago. I ended up giving the babies to the LFS.

 

definitely following your progress on this one...:thumbup:

 

Day 4 of Dosing

I just doubled my dosage to 3.2 ml. Too early to see any changes.

 

Be uber cautious about increasing the dose, especially doubling it. Right now, you have a very small bacterial population processing the vinegar/carbon and might actually have a "unused" portion of the carbon building up. Upping the dose while the bacterial population is still building can make over-dosing more likely. 3.2 is still small but I would not push too hard. You want the bacterial populations to be limited to the dosing, not to be able to increase beyond the dosing the daily dose because there is "left-overs" from previous underutilized carbon.

You will not see any changes if it is gradual this early.

 

Be uber cautious about increasing the dose, especially doubling it. Right now, you have a very small bacterial population processing the vinegar/carbon and might actually have a "unused" portion of the carbon building up. Upping the dose while the bacterial population is still building can make over-dosing more likely. 3.2 is still small but I would not push too hard. You want the bacterial populations to be limited to the dosing, not to be able to increase beyond the dosing the daily dose because there is "left-overs" from previous underutilized carbon.

You will not see any changes if it is gradual this early.

Thanks Doc. The plan is to keep with this dose for the next four days, then add 4.0ml to that dose weekly. I also think I underestimated my total water volume in the system to be even more cautious.

EDIT: 4.0ml not 2.0

 

DOC, have you ever carbon dosed with vinegar before? You actually want a continues concentration in the water to fuel bacteria. Most of the carbon dosing instructions have been written with vodka in mind, trying to prevent a cyano outbreak. Randy Holmes Farley experimented with vinegar, bumping up in large amounts all the way up to 410ml in his 120g reef before noticing negative side-effects. In that time, he never noticed a bacterial film or cloudy water. Vinegar is much safer carbon source to work with for the hobbyist and a lot of people increase the amount very quickly, even when nutrients are already low.

 

I have used Vodka, V&V and a VSV mix.

I agree it is "safer" but only slightly and I am always concerned about "change over" of the bacterial populations as well as the total bacterial population (because there is the likelihood that the shift in nutrient flows may kill off other bacterial populations). It is not just the amount dosed but how quickly the populations increase and reach that critical mass whereby you have the population boom.

 

I agree with Doc.
I have read Randy's thread and I believe he ended up having to cut the dose by half, I could be wrong, but none the less every tank is different and it's better to error on the side of caution.

 

Randy cut his dose to 150ml. He was experimenting with how much vinegar he could run before experiencing negative effects on the tank from dosing. I believe that he runs even less than that now, around 80ml, not because there were negative effects from running more but because there were no further positive effects from dosing more. Perhaps this is because vinegar is hydrophilic and does not need associated bacteria to be removed. Once the bacteria have reached N or P limitation, the rest of the vinegar is simply skimmed out. From this, you can conclude that too little vinegar does almost nothing positive and too much vinegar does almost nothing negative. This gives the amount of possible vinegar to dose for positive results a very wide window.

 

http://www.reefcentral.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1813810&highlight=i+found+it

I think this is it. I've got a bunch bookmarked.

 

Lol... I just found it as well.

 

It is all about what is limiting and when. With Randy's tank, pushing the carbon beyond a certain amount generates a certain limited return because then either N or P becomes limiting and throttles the bacteria back.

When ramping up, you do not really know what that limiting point might be... it could be 10mL or 1000mL but it is when C N and P are all "unlimited" is when things go down hill. So dosing 100mL of whatever carbon source is "fine" is N or P is limiting... but at the same time 1/4 of that amount could lead to bacterial-bliss and an anoxic event that crashes a system (if CNP becomes unlimited for a significant bacterial bloom). When ramping up carbon, you do not often know how much the lack of carbon is throttling back bacterial activity. Thus keeping C as limited as possible while ramping up is a good thing.

Keep in mind it is all about what is "limiting" the bacteria in the system. It is safer (IMO) to assume that both N and P are unlimited when increasing carbon levels. It is better to be able to control C (because N and P are much more difficult) in preventing bacteria populations booms.

Also, test kits can not tell you if anything is limited or not... it can only tell you if there is excess in the water column at that moment.

 

It is all about what is limiting and when. With Randy's tank, pushing the carbon beyond a certain amount generates a certain limited return because then either N or P becomes limiting and throttles the bacteria back.

When ramping up, you do not really know what that limiting point might be... it could be 10mL or 1000mL but it is when C N and P are all "unlimited" is when things go down hill. So dosing 100mL of whatever carbon source is "fine" is N or P is limiting... but at the same time 1/4 of that amount could lead to bacterial-bliss and an anoxic event that crashes a system (if CNP becomes unlimited for a significant bacterial bloom). When ramping up carbon, you do not often know how much the lack of carbon is throttling back bacterial activity. Thus keeping C as limited as possible while ramping up is a good thing.

Keep in mind it is all about what is "limiting" the bacteria in the system. It is safer (IMO) to assume that both N and P are unlimited when increasing carbon levels. It is better to be able to control C (because N and P are much more difficult) in preventing bacteria populations booms.

Also, test kits can not tell you if anything is limited or not... it can only tell you if there is excess in the water column at that moment.

I don't disagree with you DOC. The "guidelines" are much more important to follow if you are carbon source dosing to deal with a nutrient problem rather than maintaining good levels or decreasing to ULN levels.

 

just curious. are you dosing the sump, or the dt. also are you dosing all at once or over the day. and finally do you plan on dosing a bacteria like microbacter7. just wan to get a feel for the finer details. i stopped dosing vodka a 3-4 months ago. no negative effects but it only seemed to get me so far. wasnt using a very good skimmer also. ive upgraded now so, was thinking of starting vinegar dosing to.

 

As of now I'm dosing by hand. I'm just squirting the syringe into a mp10(high flow area). When I find my sweet spot, I'll dose through a BRS 1.1 ml/min pump through my Apex spread throughout my photoperiod.

 

One Week of Dosing

Not too much to report. This is my chart for week one:

The original plan was to up my dosage by 4.0 ml in the second week of dosing but I've decided to err on the side of caution and only add 2.0 ml for the week. I'll add another 2.0 ml next week.

Here is the skimmate from the last five days. I opened up my gate valve a bit just in case the skimmer went nuts. It didn't.

 

Did you notice more skimmate yet ?

 

Haven't noticed anything yet.

 

I've been dosing for twelve days now. I cleaned my skimmer cup and neck yesterday and noticed the skimmate was a tad darker and more "chunky", it also had an even more repugnant odor than usual. I also lost one of my big hairy mushrooms. I'm not sure if it's related because my xenia and toadstool look as good as ever.

 

With carbon, you should expect the foam starts to look a bit more plastic-y but 12 days is still very "young" for carbon to have an effect yet.

 

Fair enough, I think sometimes I see what I want to see, if that makes sense. Maybe the skimmate is darker because I opened the gate a bit in preparation for excess skimmate. I'm still puzzled on the disintegration of my shroom.

 

Im not exactly sure but if it was carbon related it would be "lighting" related as carbon dosing should clarify the water a bit so it would be exposed to higher light levels. Still, I would expect this to happen on days 21-28 rather than day 12

 

If think it would take a big clarity change, even still seems like the overall light amount wouldn't be large. That's something I've never thought about.

I would think being a shroom and tough coral at that it would release and try to find a new home instead of dissolving.

Very weird occurrence really either way to me.

 

I upped my dose today. I got a 0 reading on my Hanna PO4 checker, but I'm chalking that up to the +/- 0.04 precision of the test kit.

 

Looks like it is working for you slowly but surely. I would expect your nitrate to drop before phosphate; then again you do have sand in the tank so there is probably excess detritus somewhere.

 

Upped my dose again today. My PO4 read at 0.04 and nitrates were between 2.5ppm and 5ppm(tough to tell on the Salifert kit), I'll call it five.

 

And just for fun, this is about five days of skimming.