Vinegar dosing

[bhodges82]

I recently started dosing vinegar with my r/o water that runs through my two fishes kalk reactor. I am adding 300ml per 10 gallons of  r/o water. My question is has anyone experienced a brackish film inside of the Reservoir after starting vinegar dosing? I just opened the Reservoir to refill it and had to clean the pump and also the reactor because it had made it into the reactor and settled on top of the kalk. Is this normal? What could the black crap be?

 

[bhodges82]

It felt slimy/slippery

 

[FutureInterest]

It's bacterial slime.  Dosing carbon causes bacteria to bloom.  I think you want the bacteria in your tank to bloom though and not in your reactor so perhaps you should dose directly to the sump.

 

[bhodges82]

It's safe to say that I am over due in seeing up my dose pump again. I guess it's time to do that. I want having this problem when I was using less water /vinegar in the Reservoir, I guess that more of both and the extended time to use it up gave more time to the bacteria.

 

[terry]

I prefer vodka. You dose much less.

 

[torqued]

How many gallons of RO do you put in per day???

Check the chart here

http://reefkeeping.com/joomla/index.php/current-issue/article/116-vinegar-dosing-methodology-for-the-marine-aquarium

For my tank (180g), even at week 16 I would only be dosing 73ml per day.  It also should not have anything to do with your RO water...

My suggestion would be to dose it separately so its not going to vary along with your evap.  I don't like using evap to dose because of its instability in seasons and humidity.  That is why I don't like using Kalk as my sole alk/ca dosing either.

 

[torqued]

While vodka you dose less, it has two major downsides.  First, it has been observed in studies that dosing vodka has a much higher likelihood of causing cyano outbreaks.  Second, the ethanol has been shown to specifically inhibit the bacteria that converts nitrate to nitrogen gas.  For that reason alone I am no longer using Vodka, and have switched to Vinegar.  IMHO there is no upside to vodka other than smaller dosing amounts.  ive found the impacts vinegar has to Ph to be extremely minimal as well (was my only other concern).

 

[Adam]

lol Kurt, We were basically saying the same thing in two different threads and even referenced the same article.

I agree dosing anything with top off water is way to inconsistent to keep things stable. I'm thinking about going back to kalk but using my DOS to dose it. For vinegar I wouldn't ever try it in my ATO again and only add it to my Kalk once I had a baseline for the ideal dose using the methods in the article you linked.

Also I prefer to vodka dose myself and use vinegar in the tank

 

[torqued]

lol Kurt, We were basically saying the same thing in two different threads and even referenced the same article.