Vodka dosing to reduce nitrates/phosphates?

+1 on vodka dosing; however, I dc'd once the hair algae was in check.

Couple other things I noticed to beware of:

- white film requires more elbow grease to swipe off. Can see it much better by looking from behind the pane (from the sides).

- Filter socks go biological FAST, so beware of clogging/overflow

- skimmer phases into high production while algae dies off, but then watch for a dramatic decrease. Noticed bubble production went way down. Took skimmer offline to investigate and found a brown agar-like film growing inside walls of the skimmer. Cleaned with good scrub/vinegar soak and was back in business.

- can also nourish bad bacteria, such as on fish scales. Keep watch for fin pop, or pop eye. Don't carry out if fish have signs to begin with. With that said, I did NOT notice an increase in cyano. I attribute that to a higher population of existing beneficial bacteria in the tank. Could have gone the other way if tank wasn't mature, or had deficient bio-filtration.

Whatever you do - go slow, and don't over dose.
 
Cheech, on my setup I get to about 1ml at week 4 and then I get the white film and then week 5 on I dose around .8 - .9ml a day on my tank. Dosing goes by water volume so those numbers are just what I found to work on my tank but each tank is different. Like I mentioned though, biggest thing with carbon dosing, just like with AA (amino acid) dosing is DO NOT overdose. I manually add Vodka with a 1ml syringe. Since I do so little (unlike the article you linked to) it isn't a big deal to dose .75ml all at once, that is like 10 drops. ;)

I have found on AAs that you never dose what the bottle tells you.. start off with 1/4 dose and maybe move up to 1/2 dose later on, but a full dose like a bottle would tell you to do has always caused problems for me and a couple others I know that warned me of the dangers before hand (I didn't listen and had the exact problems they said I would, major hair algae outbreak with AAs).
 
question on this... If I dose my tank with Vodka, will it harm my plants in the refugium that are trying to absorb the Nitrates... Or to put it another way, can the dose be just so much that the nitrates are maintained at a reasonable level for plant feeding?
 
Once the system is in full swing, the growing bacteria will outcompete most macroalgae. If you have decorative species growing, chances are they will eventually stop growing and may even (they did in my case) die back.
 
From my understanding, there are 2 trains of thought on dosing a carbon source. 1. Dose all the time to make your tank into a bacteria driven tank for keeping nitrates and phosphates down, or 2. Dose only when you have a problem aglae in your display taking over and other means just aren't cutting it (this is what I do).

I dose enough to starve the problem algae in the tank out of existence, but not to the point I am killing off my Macro algae in my sump. Sure, the macro algae in the sump doesn't grow much if at all during carbon dosing, but it usually doesn't die off completely as long as I stop dosing once my problem algae in my display is gone. Both methods are fine and accepted now a days, just depends on if you want to start dosing at all and if so, which method, ie, do you want to stick with daily dosing the rest of the tanks life and not miss a day or just do it to solve a problem that for whatever reason got a little out of hand.
 
Does this dosing affect the other good algae in your tank (coraline etc.)
 
If this is just getting a bacteria that lives in your tank, and feeds on algae, it would live according to the amount of food being fed, right? So if I wanted zero Nitrates, I would feed X amount daily, but if I wanted to maintain a low level of nitrates, then I could feed less...

is this faulty logic?
 
Or, not on algae per se, but on the nitrates and phosphates that produce bad algae...
 
That is correct, you can dose lower levels of a carbon source and still build up your bacteria levels from what they are at currently without going "full blown" and getting to the white film point. If say on my tank I know 1ml is the point I get the white film, if I stopped dosing when I reached .7ml I would never reach the saturation point, yet I would still be feeding the bacteria and maintaining a specific level if I continue to dose.

Since bacteria comes in good and bad varieties and we never really know which you have in your tank or how much of each, it is not a 100% full proof method dosing carbon. Say you had a 90% bad (cyano)/10% good bacteria ratio in your tank and you started dosing, you could easily cause problems. I really have no idea how the hobbiest could ever know exactly how much and of which type of bacteria is in a tank so carbon dosing still has a little "voodoo" to it from the hobbiest standpoint.
 
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