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Unread 01/14/2018, 07:10 PM   #309
Dan_P
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Join Date: Aug 2014
Posts: 1,432
Quote:
Originally Posted by taricha View Post
If one were to refigure a dosing formula for large tanks, would it make more sense to scale it to volume, current tested parameters of N&P, or to food inputs - like scrubbers do with the screen area proportional to #of cubes fed daily?
The initial dosing, i.e., for the first week, is scaled by the volume of the system, then for all system sizes the dose increases are a constant amount. It would make more sense to base the increased dose on system size. The increase for a 50 gallon would be twice that for a 25 gallon system, 4 times for a 100 gallon system. This assumes the week 2 increment for the 25 gallon system is “correct”.

I believe that we do not know the connection between the ppm of acetate and ppm of nitrate in our systems or for that matter whether there is a connection. And that is why most aquarists start with a low ppm of acetate and slowly increase it to see what happens.

If carbon dosing works like it does in shrimp farms, the extra carbon is used to shunt ammonia into bacterial biomass away from oxidation to nitrate. For aquariums, the existing nitrate might be consumed through denitrification, by algae or coral and the carbon dosing is not involved at all, though I have read suggestions that the dosed carbon feeds denitrifying bacteria too.

I started dosing to achieve a daily 1 ppm level of acetate. I will monitor things (pore water NH3 & PO4, tank alkalinity use rate, chlorine demand-a measure of organics, skimmate production, cyanobacteria, algae and the fish) for a couple weeks to see what is changing before deciding to increase dose, maintain it at 1ppm or abort the experiment.


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