What is the recommended daily dose of distilled vinager?

[Randy Holmes-Farley]

If I'm understanding it correctly according to his interview video with ReefDudes, it is. They recommend priming the system with CO2 scrubbed air, or air from outside pumped in and diffused through a wooden airstone, then inducing a controlled bacterial bloom of nitrifying bacteria. This supposedly stops the dinos from being able to photosynthesize due to the limited CO2.

Reducing CO2 is a historically somewhat effective plan, but carbon dosing adds a lot of CO2 and combining the methods may work, but unless the pH rises substantially, you are not starving them for CO2.

 

[Randy Holmes-Farley]

That chart has all sorts of stuff going on. I have to say I don’t understand why adding peroxide depends on the pH on day 3.

 

[rennjidk]

That chart has all sorts of stuff going on. I have to say I don’t understand why adding peroxide depends on the pH on day 3.

He states in the video that it's to "Knock back the nitrifying bacteria population." I don't understand half of it tbh, but there's an entire thread of people who've been successful with it and it keeps getting recommended. Then again at 16:46, when confronted with a direct quote from yourself over dosing vinegar instead of vodka, as not to be as readily available for cyano, he basically says that it's a bad idea, because vodka is sterile and vinegar contains vinegar eels and bad bacteria which will replicate in your tank, lol. I guess he missed the distilled part. Either way, this is a last ditch effort for me before Dino-X, so I'm willing to try.

 

[taricha]

This entire thread was created with the sole purpose of asking how much vinegar to dose in place of vodka, as a carbon source, for the elegant corals method.

Ah, well sorry it took us so long to get there. 1mL vodka = 8mL vinegar. The amount of vodka recommended in the method is so high, that if using vinegar instead, I'd add some kalk to the vinegar to blunt the pH effect.

This method doesn't mention vinegar (unless I missed it) but I'd imagine you can substitute the vodka values (taking into consideration the ph effects of vinegar).

In the video, the creator says you could use vinegar in place of vodka or a combo. But I wouldn't take his word for it that they are interchangeable.

Out compete for CO2? That’s definitely not the mechanism when carbon dosing. I hope that isn’t the mechanism proposed in that thread.

There's all kinds of nonsense proposed in that thread as the "mechanism" for how it works. It's full of conflation of high CO2 and low O2, pH and O2, nitrifiers and heterotrophs, nonsense about microbubbling, suggestions that while carbon dosing, CO2 gets depleted (when in fact it's massively the opposite). A lot of nonsense that you argued against in the thread.
In spite of the bunk justifications behind it - people have found it helpful... if they didn't under-aerate and drop their O2 to zero and kill livestock.

If I'm understanding it correctly according to his interview video with ReefDudes, it is. They recommend priming the system with CO2 scrubbed air, or air from outside pumped in and diffused through a wooden airstone, then inducing a controlled bacterial bloom of nitrifying bacteria. This supposedly stops the dinos from being able to photosynthesize due to the limited CO2.

See my above comment. Randy spent pages in that thread debunking all kinds of incorrect info of how it works.

I misspoke, they are actually recommending 10mL of vodka per 30gals of water volume daily according to the elegant corals method I just posted above.

And this is the crux of it.
It's a huge, disruptive carbon dose. Massive bacterial bloom (cloudy water) is generated and maintained. heterotroph bacteria run wild and dominate all surfaces (white slime/filaments visible). What exactly they "outcompete" the photosynthetic nuisance for is perhaps many things: space on substrate, O2 at night, Nitrogen...
It certainly sets the photosynthetic nuisances back a good bit.

 

[rennjidk]

See my above comment. Randy spent pages in that thread debunking all kinds of incorrect info of how it works.

I didn't say I agreed with it, lol. I was just repeating the explanation the creator of the treatment gave. What are your thoughts on the more recent dino dosing thread posted a few months ago? They are essentially doing the same thing only by dosing 1-3mL of Nopox nightly and never getting to the cloud level of bacterial blooms or low O2.

 

[taricha]

What are your thoughts on the more recent dino dosing thread posted a few months ago? They are essentially doing the same thing only by dosing 1-3mL of Nopox nightly and never getting to the cloud level of bacterial blooms or low O2.

which one? link?

 

[rennjidk]

which one? link?

Sorry, it didn't paste correctly. Here you go.

 

[taricha]

What are your thoughts on the more recent dino dosing thread posted a few months ago?

This was my response to that nice article....

I had read it, just didn't have a chance to respond before I forgot and got distracted.
It's quite good. Beuchat has spent enough time in dino threads that he's probably looking at the right organisms (even without microscope ID).
It's also interesting to me because the article is consistent with what people found with the Elegant Corals method where a massive carbon dose drives a cloudy water bacterial bloom and shocks the system away from a dino/cyano outbreak. It really pushes cyano and dinos out of their niche - at least temporarily. I think @Reef and Dive has advised people with this method a good bit and finds it's generally successful (it's extreme - drops O2. don't play around if you have a tank full of great stuff. )

So massive bacterial blooms overwhelm dinos, makes sense as the reproduction rates for dinos are like ~a day vs <an hour for a bacteria during a well-fed bloom.
But what's new about Beuchat's article is the suggestion that a very modest constant carbon dose can also keep dinos in check. Sounds a lot like zeo method systems.
I confess I've been skeptical of zeo systems because years ago I saw the single worst dino outbreak ever posted on a forum - and it was a zeo user. But it turns out over time that anecdote doesn't seem to be backed up by a wider trend.

To me the central nut of the article is that while we in the hobby associate pushing nutrients (especially PO4) very low with bringing on dino outbreaks - it matters a lot how they are lowered.
Lowering nutrients with carbon dosing does not seem to create a risk for dinos the way that lowering via GFO or some other methods often does.

The procedure laid out by beuchat is much more conservative than the Elegant Corals method, and I see no issue with trying that first instead of the more dramatic carbon dose onslaught.

 

[Miami Reef]

Lowering nutrients with carbon dosing does not seem to create a risk for dinos the way that lowering via GFO or some other methods often does.

I didn’t think of it this way. That’s probably how zeovit tanks get ULN without dinos. It seems like a well-established bacterial population will grow when phosphates reduce from carbon dosing, effectively taking up the real estate.

Maybe GFO only reduces the nutrients, but now there are bare rocks with no competition for space in low nutrients besides for dinos.

 

[Randy Holmes-Farley]

I didn’t think of it this way. That’s probably how zeovit tanks get ULN without dinos. It seems like a well-established bacterial population will grow when phosphates reduce from carbon dosing, effectively taking up the real estate.

Maybe GFO only reduces the nutrients, but now there are bare rocks with no competition for space in low nutrients besides for dinos.

That’s certainly how and why I think low nutrients encourage dinos: reducing competition. If competition is maintained, low nutrients would not be an issue.

 

[rennjidk]

Dinos are receding greatly. Unfortunately I needed to cut the experiment short and could not attribute much to carbon dosing. It may have slowed them down slightly, but that could also be due to the reduced lighting. Nothing I tried made much of an impact except for Dino-X. I'm on day 3 and just did my second dose a few hours ago. I'd say around 80% of the dinos are gone. The few zoa frags I have now are alive, but tucked up. Idk how it would effect sps or LPS, but I can tell you that it does work as advertised in regards to dinos.

 

[Miami Reef]

Dinos are receding greatly. Unfortunately I needed to cut the experiment short and could not attribute much to carbon dosing.

Why did you need to cut the experiment short?

 

[rennjidk]

Why did you need to cut the experiment short?

I have a WWC black friday shipment coming at the beginning of Jan. I needed to get the dinos resolved before then, and 3 weeks is about as much of a buffer as I'm willing to allow before dropping in a bunch of SPS frags.