Thanks!
Randy's vinegar dosing limit. I found it!
- Thread starter Randy Holmes-Farley
- Start date
Thanks!
People have made that hypothesis, but I haven't seen any reason to see how that can work. The soft tissue creates the skeleton, so it has to be there for the coral to grow.
Yes. White vinegar.
I agree. I think it has more to do with ULNS.
The “chart” refers to the one everyone is using, first published years ago, reprinted many times in this forum. If correctly scaled, recommended dosing schedules in this chart would be greater for larger systems. That’s what I meant. Scary large volumes of vinegar are not really “off the chart” 
OK
The chart was introduced about 9 years ago when carbon dosing began to be more popular. Folks were experiencing bacterial blooms,O2 deprivation and other negatives from rapid and seemingly excessive start up dosing in search of rapid nitrate reduction. The chart provides a very slow safe guide for amping up, but did not provide a cap or guide for maintenance dosing which would vary from tank to tank. The approach then was basically to keep amping up slowly until a rapid decline in nitrate and/or a bacterial bloom occurred and then to back off by half for maintenance. Randy and others wondered how high you could actually go ; hence he authored this thread and his experiment noting 2 ml per gallon led to serious problems in his tank and recovery when he backed off to the .5ml range. I wanted to know what others were experiencing ,so I started a thread on another forum . From contributions to that thread , reading a hundred or more anecdotal accounts over the years , Randy's work and about 10 years of dosing I've settled on recommending .3 to .6 ml of 5% acetic acid vinegar or equivalent amount of including 40% ethanol vodka(80 proof) per gallon as a reasonable normative max cap range with tweaks up or down based on observations of a particular tank .
In my case 36ml of 80 proof vodka; equivalent to 288ml of vodka plus 60 ml of 5% acetic acid vinegar dosed daily to the 700 gallon system for many years maintains low nitrate and PO4 without toublesome conglomerations of bacterial mass or blooms and a minimal .15 or so decline in pH which is offset by kalk dosing and a CO2 scrubber.
OK
The chart was introduced about 9 years ago when carbon dosing began to be more popular. Folks were experiencing bacterial blooms,O2 deprivation and other negatives from rapid and seemingly excessive start up dosing in search of rapid nitrate reduction. The chart provides a very slow safe guide for amping up, but did not provide a cap or guide for maintenance dosing which would vary from tank to tank. The approach then was basically to keep amping up slowly until a rapid decline in nitrate and/or a bacterial bloom occurred and then to back off by half for maintenance. Randy and others wondered how high you could actually go ; hence he authored this thread and his experiment noting 2 ml per gallon led to serious problems in his tank and recovery when he backed off to the .5ml range. I wanted to know what others were experiencing ,so I started a thread on another forum . From contributions to that thread , reading a hundred or more anecdotal accounts over the years , Randy's work and about 10 years of dosing I've settled on recommending .3 to .6 ml of 5% acetic acid vinegar or equivalent amount of including 40% ethanol vodka(80 proof) per gallon as a reasonable normative max cap range with tweaks up or down based on observations of a particular tank .
In my case 36ml of 80 proof vodka; equivalent to 288ml of vodka plus 60 ml of 5% acetic acid vinegar dosed daily to the 700 gallon system for many years maintains low nitrate and PO4 without toublesome conglomerations of bacterial mass or blooms and a minimal .15 or so decline in pH which is offset by kalk dosing and a CO2 scrubber.
I don't think it's a simple as a lack of tissue growth. I think the shortage of nutrients in a so called UNLS system makes it harder for the coral to direct skeletal growth for which they use ATP phosphate to mediate the caclio blastic fluid among other things. A nitrogen shortfall may also have an impact on zooxanthelae. With some PO4 and nitrogen , say PO4 at .02 to .of ppm and nitrate at.5 to 1ppm and alk in the 9 to 10dkh range there is no burnt tip syndrome in my tanks.
Done as requested . Feel free to edit for clarity if you wish.
Hi. What size/volume tank is this?
Daddi0
Active member
Wow, this is testing my memory. This was my feeding routine in January and we had approx. 120 gallons. Now we are up to 180 gallons. I have revamped my feeding and vinegar due to the fact that natural seawater we were using spiked our nitrates to over .45ppm.
Cheers! Mark
Dennco2000
New member
Not being able to use natural seawater (red tide south west Fla) has caused my problems.
My tap water is 9.5 PH so adding my kalkwasser to my top off created a total ph of 12.0 in my top off tank... My display tank ph crept up to 8.9 during the middle of the day so I started dosing 8 - 12 ml of vinegar daily (65 gal tank) to get the ph down. So far so good and I have not done any water changes in 3 to 4 months. I don't plan to increase the vinegar dosage.
I did finally buy some reef crystals so I'll do a 5 gal change this weekend until I get back to 15 gallon changes.
My tap water is 9.5 PH so adding my kalkwasser to my top off created a total ph of 12.0 in my top off tank... My display tank ph crept up to 8.9 during the middle of the day so I started dosing 8 - 12 ml of vinegar daily (65 gal tank) to get the ph down. So far so good and I have not done any water changes in 3 to 4 months. I don't plan to increase the vinegar dosage.
I did finally buy some reef crystals so I'll do a 5 gal change this weekend until I get back to 15 gallon changes.
A few days ago I discovered that my Ca was at 240!!! I validated the result by taking a water sample to my LFS and also by testing my other tank and it is confirmed that my Ca was super low.
My fault to stop doing periodic Ca tests because I felt that it was pretty stable with my Kalk dosing (ATO reservoir), so I decided to test only Alk, Nitrate, Phosphate, Salinity, Mg and sometimes K. Bad decision!
I'm now slowly correcting it by manually dosing Red Sea Calcium+ stock solution (1ml raises 2ppm Ca in 25g). Ca is now at 340ppm.
Now the question: Why? I'm maintaining my Alk at around 7.8 - 8.1 dKH with Kalk (via ATO RO water). My understanding is that normally, with this mechanism of Kalk, Ca and KH should remain leveled. If I'm monitoring my KH closely, how come Ca went so low and in a different direction? I understand that it would be more common for Ca to go up and not KH with Kalk.
Perhaps the Vinegar dosing plays a factor here? Can you help me understand what's doing on? Will I have to adjust something? Or will I just have to start dosing Ca separately of the Kalk to compensate for the Ca-KH disparity?
My fault to stop doing periodic Ca tests because I felt that it was pretty stable with my Kalk dosing (ATO reservoir), so I decided to test only Alk, Nitrate, Phosphate, Salinity, Mg and sometimes K. Bad decision!
I'm now slowly correcting it by manually dosing Red Sea Calcium+ stock solution (1ml raises 2ppm Ca in 25g). Ca is now at 340ppm.
Now the question: Why? I'm maintaining my Alk at around 7.8 - 8.1 dKH with Kalk (via ATO RO water). My understanding is that normally, with this mechanism of Kalk, Ca and KH should remain leveled. If I'm monitoring my KH closely, how come Ca went so low and in a different direction? I understand that it would be more common for Ca to go up and not KH with Kalk.
Perhaps the Vinegar dosing plays a factor here? Can you help me understand what's doing on? Will I have to adjust something? Or will I just have to start dosing Ca separately of the Kalk to compensate for the Ca-KH disparity?
Vinegar dosing probably won't make a difference. How long ago was the last calcium test before you got the 240 ppm measurement? Water changes will lower alkalinity a bit if there's nitrate in the water column, and that could lead to this problem over a very long time frame.
You might have gotten a bad batch of salt, or there might be some other similar issue. Another possibility is dosing alkalinity supplement thinking it's calcium, which has happened at least once before.
You might have gotten a bad batch of salt, or there might be some other similar issue. Another possibility is dosing alkalinity supplement thinking it's calcium, which has happened at least once before.
Hi Jonathan,
> 6 months since my last Ca test. Ca was always around 400ppm.Embarrasing to say, but yes, I should not have stopped testing Ca.
My NO3 is almost undetectable to the point I started to dose NO3 (Sodium Nitrate solution) daily. Even with dosing, NO3 has not been greater than 0.5ppm. I also dose Kalk in my topoff water. KH has been tested weekly and been between 7.8 - 8.1 dKH.
Almost no water changes in the last 6 months.
> 6 months since my last Ca test. Ca was always around 400ppm.Embarrasing to say, but yes, I should not have stopped testing Ca.
My NO3 is almost undetectable to the point I started to dose NO3 (Sodium Nitrate solution) daily. Even with dosing, NO3 has not been greater than 0.5ppm. I also dose Kalk in my topoff water. KH has been tested weekly and been between 7.8 - 8.1 dKH.
Almost no water changes in the last 6 months.
