How Long Should Organic Carbon Dosing Take?

[Dan_P]

Maybe Redfield explains it

…sorry it’s a tic.

Don’t make me say “stoichiometry” at you :-)

 

[Dan_P]

I’ve used both Hanna, ICP test, and Trident NP — all reporting the same Nitrate of 80s +/- 5%.

Diluting: essentially, it’s a water change or diluting in half with RODI, test, and multiply by 2?

What is the visual cues to throttle back dosing due to over saturation? I got Cyano now so need to scale back right?

I think that I’m going to throw in the towel with carbon dosing. Seems like it’s good to maintain a certain level but not effective trying to reduce by 4x its current level? That or going to take several months to get there. Perhaps the fastest and cost effective solution (in my case) is to do a massive 50% WC? I’m contemplating to switch to a sulfur-based reactor. This worked before on my previous tanks.

Oh, 80 ppm is the nitrate level. Maybe this is game over for carbon dosing.

Post Game Analysis.
I don’t fully understand what happened in your system but it is behaving as if it is carbon limited and one way for that to occur is an accumulation of bacteria. A low removal rate of bacteria could be the culprit, the low skimmate volume in your system is suggestive.The fact that the system is growing cyanobacteria possibly points to benthic bacteria die off and maybe you were unlucky in that carbon dosing drove up biofilm bacteria rather than planktonic bacteria.

Good luck turning things around.

 

[Ooh fiddlesticks]

Subscribed. I'm actually have a real problem that I'm trying to solve. After months of carbon dosing (vodka), nitrate is still stubbornly high at 80ppm+. I'm listening in to see if I can simply get to 10ppm'ish by just increasing vodka dosage. Hopefully I haven't hit the rate of diminishing return and be forced to do massive water changes.

Tank is a 450gal - was dosing 30mls/day, now 45mls/day. I've added 4 caps of Microbacter7 last night to hopefully build more fighting

When you started dosing vodka did your water become cloudy?
Does it still become cloudy?
The cloud is a bacteria bloom that sucks up nutrients and then gets skimmed out.
As the tank balances and gets “used to” carbon dosing I’ve found that it doesn’t get cloudy but I know it’s working from the skimmate coming out.
30 and 45 ml/day seems like a lot, for my 65 I never did more than 5 ml of nopox but that’s just vodka and vinegar pretty much.
Also, fwiw my experience with carbon dosing is as such
The first few days the water is cloudy, nothing happens.
The next few weeks the water stays clear but again, nothing happens
Then all of a sudden nitrate and phosphate start dropping
After that I just kept my tanks on a 1 ml/day maintenance dose. Ymmv, clearly.