Carbon dosing vinegar and vodka combined

Century

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Hello, long time lurker first time posting. My question is I’ve been Carbon dosing with vinegar for the past 8 weeks. I am using the chart and currently at 37.6 ml daily dose. My nitrate is not budging even with a combination of water change once a week, I cut down my feeding to one squirt of frozen per day out of a ketchup dispenser and a pinch of pellet food. Skimmer is pulling a lot out and I have spiroax in the sump. I want to go forward with adding vodka with vinegar 50/50 mix, I am thinking starting dose at 3.5 ml Here’s my set up and params:

130 total system up and running for a year and half.
No3: 25ppm salifert test . Goal is 2-10 ppm
Phosphate: 12ppm ul hannah checker . Goal is 2-8ppm
Reef Octo 110 int skimmer

system is mix reef with lps dominate mostly and 6 fish total the biggest one is a rabbit fish and a juvenile mimic tang

Will 3.5ml be too low or too high if I am combining vinegar and vodka?
 

Jon_W79

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Hello, long time lurker first time posting. My question is I’ve been Carbon dosing with vinegar for the past 8 weeks. I am using the chart and currently at 37.6 ml daily dose. My nitrate is not budging even with a combination of water change once a week, I cut down my feeding to one squirt of frozen per day out of a ketchup dispenser and a pinch of pellet food. Skimmer is pulling a lot out and I have spiroax in the sump. I want to go forward with adding vodka with vinegar 50/50 mix, I am thinking starting dose at 3.5 ml Here’s my set up and params:

130 total system up and running for a year and half.
No3: 25ppm salifert test . Goal is 2-10 ppm
Phosphate: 12ppm ul hannah checker . Goal is 2-8ppm
Reef Octo 110 int skimmer

system is mix reef with lps dominate mostly and 6 fish total the biggest one is a rabbit fish and a juvenile mimic tang

Will 3.5ml be too low or too high if I am combining vinegar and vodka?
It will have less of a possible nitrate reducing effect than the amount of vinegar you are dosing now. Vodka is about 8 times more potent than vinegar. I believe 8.4ml would be about equivalent to the amount of vinegar you are dosing now.

I think that the denitrifying bacteria species you have in the tank may need more vitamins and/or are lacking some(assuming there is enough phosphate). I have successfully grown denitrifying bacteria without fish or fish food, and the bacteria are removing nitrate. If you want to try dosing vitamins, I would recommend at least starting with Brightwell Koralle-VM, and vitamins B1 and B5. There are some other things that I dosed but they may not be needed. It may be necessary to dose more Koralle-VM than is recommended, at least in the beginning.

Here is a paper that has information about denitrifying bacteria, and it says what vitamins someone may want to dose, and how much.
 

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Rmckoy

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vinegar and vodka is essentially nopox .

not sure if it read the phosphates value correct ?
12 ppm ?

ideally we want less than 1
0.03ppm
Nitrifying bacteria has little effect on phosphates .
 
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Century

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vinegar and vodka is essentially nopox .

not sure if it read the phosphates value correct ?
12 ppm ?

ideally we want less than 1
0.03ppm
Nitrifying bacteria has little effect on phosphates .
.012ppm*

yes essentially I’m just dosing diy nopox but since I started vinegar first I wasn’t sure if adding vodka after 8 weeks of dosing vinegar. I know nopox recommend 2ml to 25 gallon. But I wasn’t about to dose 8ml of my diy nopox since the vodka dosing chart recommend 4.3 for 100 gallon
 

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If you turned yourself on to phytoplankton dosing, it'll change your whole outlook.on managing exports.

But I'm not writing up dozens of paragraphs on the subject bc its well documented in past stuff I wrote

.
 
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Century

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It will have less of a possible nitrate reducing effect than the amount of vinegar you are dosing now. Vodka is about 8 times more potent than vinegar. I believe 8.4ml would be about equivalent to the amount of vinegar you are dosing now.

I think that the denitrifying bacteria species you have in the tank may need more vitamins and/or are lacking some(assuming there is enough phosphate). I have successfully grown denitrifying bacteria without fish or fish food, and the bacteria are removing nitrate. If you want to try dosing vitamins, I would recommend at least starting with Brightwell Koralle-VM, and vitamins B1 and B5. There are some other things that I dosed but they may not be needed. It may be necessary to dose more Koralle-VM than is recommended, at least in the beginning.

Here is a paper that has information about denitrifying bacteria, and it says what vitamins someone may want to dose, and how much.
I may need more nitrifying bacteria, I didn’t even thought of that. Thanks! I’ll give that a go and start low on my diy nopox
 
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If you turned yourself on to phytoplankton dosing, it'll change your whole outlook.on managing exports.

But I'm not writing up dozens of paragraphs on the subject bc its well documented in past stuff I wrote

.
No need to write all that but thank you for bringing it to my attention I will look into it and research on that!
 

Rmckoy

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.012ppm*

yes essentially I’m just dosing diy nopox but since I started vinegar first I wasn’t sure if adding vodka after 8 weeks of dosing vinegar. I know nopox recommend 2ml to 25 gallon. But I wasn’t about to dose 8ml of my diy nopox since the vodka dosing chart recommend 4.3 for 100 gallon
I didn’t personally have much good luck with nopox .
it works great for nitrates which ended up dropping to zero .
buy phosphates ended up not going down.
which led to nitrate limited system .
to correct it , I dosed nitrates to balance , added rowaphos to reduc phosphates .
Now nitrates are 2.5 ppm and phosphates are .04 ppm
 

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FYI, I used 3 to 4 ml of diy nopox daily in my 125 gallon total.
Kept the nitrates below 5 ppm.
 

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Hello, long time lurker first time posting. My question is I’ve been Carbon dosing with vinegar for the past 8 weeks. I am using the chart and currently at 37.6 ml daily dose. My nitrate is not budging even with a combination of water change once a week, I cut down my feeding to one squirt of frozen per day out of a ketchup dispenser and a pinch of pellet food. Skimmer is pulling a lot out and I have spiroax in the sump. I want to go forward with adding vodka with vinegar 50/50 mix, I am thinking starting dose at 3.5 ml Here’s my set up and params:

130 total system up and running for a year and half.
No3: 25ppm salifert test . Goal is 2-10 ppm
Phosphate: 12ppm ul hannah checker . Goal is 2-8ppm
Reef Octo 110 int skimmer

system is mix reef with lps dominate mostly and 6 fish total the biggest one is a rabbit fish and a juvenile mimic tang

Will 3.5ml be too low or too high if I am combining vinegar and vodka?
Until you reach 1 mL vinegar per gallon of aquarium water, just keep increasing the vinegar dose. Make sure there is detectable PO4.
 

KrisReef

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What nitrate test? If the test doesn't move perhaps that isn't accurate enough to detect improvements?

It takes awhile for a take to start "eating" nitrate ime. When it does, you may also increase feeding or even start dosing nitrate.

Welcome to Reef2Reef!
 
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Century

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What nitrate test? If the test doesn't move perhaps that isn't accurate enough to detect improvements?

It takes awhile for a take to start "eating" nitrate ime. When it does, you may also increase feeding or even start dosing nitrate.

Welcome to Reef2Reef!
That may could be the case but after reduce feeding and wc I would like to see a dent but nothing. I am using salifert and I cross check it with my lfs to make sure I’m not doing something wrong. Nothing is stressing but I would just like to have more control over no3.
 

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That may could be the case but after reduce feeding and wc I would like to see a dent but nothing. I am using salifert and I cross check it with my lfs to make sure I’m not doing something wrong. Nothing is stressing but I would just like to have more control over no3.
Cool-Salifert is one of the reliable test kit companies!
 

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How do your corals look? I'm not saying that certain parameters shouldn't be in a target range, but chasing numbers if your coral look good rarely ends well.
 
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How do your corals look? I'm not saying that certain parameters shouldn't be in a target range, but chasing numbers if your coral look good rarely ends well.
They look fine meaning not stressing, puffy, torch all open. But from looking at the trend it is going up especially if I want to add more fish later on, if I can’t handle it now I just think it’ll be tougher later on.
 
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Just to update this post for future use. So I got my no3 down to 5-10 ppm. I stopped dosing straight vinegar then went into nopox around September, then again nothing much was happening (I thought I had too many (14 fish total), I now have 9 fish total), so I went ahead and rehomed some fish. Then I waited another few weeks then again nothing was happening, but then my biggest break through was when I upped my alk to 9.0 from 7.0. My PH was finally around 8 then I saw a steady drop in no3 each week.

I read the relationship between no3 and alk and how it interact with one another so that’s what made me upped my alk. Now everything is steady and back on track. So my advice if your alk is low trying raising it to an 8-9. I was dosing 14.5 ml a day in my 130 gallon system (100 display and 30 for the sump) but since it came down I have cut back to 7.5ml

A few wc but nothing major, haven’t done one in about two weeks. It took about 3 month for nopox after I corrected my own issue so keep that in mind if you want to use nopox. It’ll work but it’ll need some help on your end

Here’s my recent test

no3-7ppm
Po4- .06
Alk-9
Cal-420
Mag-1320
Ph-8
Temp-89
Salinity-1.024-25
 

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Following this thread . I’m just about at 1 ml of vinegar per gallon and no reduction yet . 90 gallon aquarium. I’m at 80 ml of vinegar at nitrates are holding at 32-64 ppm, Red Sea . I’m going to up it to 100 ml per day and recheck in 2 days .
 

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Correction I was already above 1 ml per gallon . @100 I’m still adding to make it 120 ml per day on a 90 gallon.
 

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Correction I was already above 1 ml per gallon . @100 I’m still adding to make it 120 ml per day on a 90 gallon.
What ended up happening I’m at 70 ml vinegar daily on an 82 total gallon system. And nitrates are not dropping
 
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