Carbon dosing
 

I am currently starting week 4 of my vinegar dosing regimen.
The green algae on my rocks has improved. It seems to have loosened up so that if I blow the rocks with a turkey baster some of it will flake off. The sandbed seems to be slowly clearing up too.
The long hair algae doesn’t seem to be improving at the same rate.
Is it normal for this to persist a bit longer?
I’m also curious to know what do I do after the 16 week program is complete?

16 week program? huh? Someone is selling carbon dosing as a 16 week program now? :facepalm:

Carbon dose as long as needed to maintain the level of nutrients you want..
That may be a month or so...may be for the first year of the tank... Or maybe the life of the tank or whatever else as needed..

As your nutrient levels start to drop and get to the point you want to keep them at you can cut your dosage and stay at a "maintenance dose" to attempt to keep nutrient levels stable..

Algae can take quite a while to die off and may never actually.. Manual removal or consumption by critters,etc... may be required.

Remember.. If algae is starving/being deprived of nutrients so is potentially anything else in the tank fed off those nutrients.. So its a balancing act..

When I had algae in my tank, I got a lawnmower blenny.... did an awesome job at keeping all the algae in-check. He never went hungry and pretty fun to watch.

Mac- the 16 week program I’m talking about is from the link you recommended for vinegar dosing lol!
It may not be exactly sixteen weeks but it’s pretty darn close.
So If I get my nitrate level down to where I want it before I reach the end should I stop increasing the dosage every week and just continue with where I’m at?

Do you have a copy of that link? There may just be some misinterpretation going on. With carbon dosing most people will use it basically as a throttle to drive how high or low they want nutrients to be. I carbon dose with vodka, and it allows me to feed a ton, and maintain elevated but not ridiculous nutrients. If I wanted ultra low nutrients I’d give a little more. But it’s a long term/indefinite practice.


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I'd be interested in a good comprehensive article about carbon dosing also...there's an awful lot of half explanations or information... Most posts are just questions that get answered and then that's it.

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http://reefkeeping.com/issues/2008-08/nftt/

This is the article I followed when I started. Once you’re trucking along you’re able to manipulate it manually. It’s important to build up that artificially dense population of bacteria slowly at first. And once you drive NO3 down to zero you can cut your dose in half. And from there add a little or dose a little less if you want more or less nutrients. I ended up at 8
Ml a day before NO3 hit zero. Cut it in half to 4 ml a day and NO3 came up a hair to 0.25-1ppm. Kept it there a while and I’ve eventually lowered it further to 1.5 ml per day which has driven NO3 up to around 15 ppm and PO4 up to 0.1 ppm.



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I think you are talking about the chart and the time it recommends "ramping up" the dosage over.. Thats not a "get to 16 weeks and you are done thing" but rather the time period they suggest you increase the dosage over..

So quick question since we are all here...

I think I have seen somewhere on here that I could test for nitrate and phosphates and get zero, but that doesn't mean I don't have high levels of them.... I think the rational was, if I'm having algae issues then maybe they are using up the nitrate and phosphates fast enough to give me a zero reading.
I don't know how valid this is, or I may even be remembering it a bit wrong.

At this point in my tank I'm about 7 months in and I feel my tank is righting itself without doing much to it. My rocks got a brown coating on them with a fine fuzzy white hair like coating on the brown. But over the last month it's slowly been going away and my rocks are getting whiter again.

I have two small areas of "brush" or turf algae that doesn't bother me much as they are small and out of the way.

My sand bed has a good mat of a different greyish algae... Almost looks like green hair algea that's died off...

Anyway I guess my question is.... Is the hidden nitrates and phosphates a valid theory? And if so would carbon dosing help?

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I definitely misunderstood the concept of using the chart just to get to where I wanted to be as opposed to completing a program.
Thanks for pointing that out!

And I think I may add a lawnmower Lenny anyway.
I haven’t added a new fish in almost 6 months and it’s giving me an itch!

Blenny!
&$@# spellcheck!!