Treating with Vitamin C
- Thread starter JohnL
- Start date
Jeff
Premium Member
It's been awhile since the instructions were posted and I have gotten a few pm's about how to do it and what it does so here is an update:
If you want to spend a couple of dollars a month on a natural product that has shown to improve coral growth, color, spread. A product that will decrease nitrates and phosphates and improve coral and fish health and is easy to dose, try vitamin c and see if it helps. Take some "before" pictures, go slow with it, follow the directions, read this entire 132 page thread for some inspiration if you have the time, be objective and mature about your contribution here (please), and STOP dosing if you have a problem. No one in here has anything to gain by anybody else using it, its just something that was found to benefit corals (softies mostly). Pufferpunk took the idea, tested it, refined the process, found a good product to use and started this whole thing. I have been dosing it for almost 2 years with unreal results.
Here are the directions:
Use this product:
http://www.iherb.com/ProductDetails.aspx?pid=10178&at=0
To figure out how much to use, decide if you want to simply improve coral growth, spread, and color. If so, then you should dose around 5 ppm twice daily (down to 2-3 ppm works also). If you are having problems with coral or fish health, dose up to around 30 ppm twice daily.
Calculate the total net number of gallons in your tank (minus rocks, sand, etc). Enter that number here ______.
You will now need to do a little math. The amounts below are for 100 gallons of water so if you have 50 net gallons, cut the amounts shown below in half etc.
Dosing amounts using Iherb product:
1/4 tsp=1112 mg.
For every 100 gallons:
5 ppm ----- 1892 mg VC
10 ppm ---- 3785 mg VC
15 ppm ---- 5677 mg VC
20 ppm ---- 7570 mg VC
25 ppm ---- 9462 mg VC
30 ppm ---- 11355 mg VC
After you have figured out how much you want to dose at each dosing, enter that number here _____. This is your dose to be used twice a day.
Notes:
*Be sure your pH and alk are within normal reef limits before starting. Adjust if needed. Monitor weekly.
*Shoot for a ppm of around 5 or lower if only dosing for improved coral growth, coloration, and spread. Shoot for higher amounts up to 30 ppm if you are having melting zoas or closed zoas and look for the causes of your problems as you dose. Check for high nitrates, pests, zoa pox, predators, and unstable water conditions.
*Dose low amounts and increase the amount slowly over the course of a few days to a couple weeks.
* If you notice an algae bloom (white stringy stuff) or increased scum on your glass then cut back by half until it disappears.
* Watch your skimmer, it will start to skim more.
* Dose the amount twice a day in a fast moving area of your sump or overflow. You may dilute the vitamin c in ro/di water then pour into overflow. If adding to sump, try and add the vitamin c after filtration such as skimmers and reactors.
* If you have a question, ask here. Puffy checks this thread daily.
* The instructions in this guide and throughout this thread are based on using pure Sodium Ascorbate, not vitamin c pills and other non-buffered forms of vitamin c.
Be sure to take some "before" pics!
If you want to spend a couple of dollars a month on a natural product that has shown to improve coral growth, color, spread. A product that will decrease nitrates and phosphates and improve coral and fish health and is easy to dose, try vitamin c and see if it helps. Take some "before" pictures, go slow with it, follow the directions, read this entire 132 page thread for some inspiration if you have the time, be objective and mature about your contribution here (please), and STOP dosing if you have a problem. No one in here has anything to gain by anybody else using it, its just something that was found to benefit corals (softies mostly). Pufferpunk took the idea, tested it, refined the process, found a good product to use and started this whole thing. I have been dosing it for almost 2 years with unreal results.
Here are the directions:
Use this product:
http://www.iherb.com/ProductDetails.aspx?pid=10178&at=0
To figure out how much to use, decide if you want to simply improve coral growth, spread, and color. If so, then you should dose around 5 ppm twice daily (down to 2-3 ppm works also). If you are having problems with coral or fish health, dose up to around 30 ppm twice daily.
Calculate the total net number of gallons in your tank (minus rocks, sand, etc). Enter that number here ______.
You will now need to do a little math. The amounts below are for 100 gallons of water so if you have 50 net gallons, cut the amounts shown below in half etc.
Dosing amounts using Iherb product:
1/4 tsp=1112 mg.
For every 100 gallons:
5 ppm ----- 1892 mg VC
10 ppm ---- 3785 mg VC
15 ppm ---- 5677 mg VC
20 ppm ---- 7570 mg VC
25 ppm ---- 9462 mg VC
30 ppm ---- 11355 mg VC
After you have figured out how much you want to dose at each dosing, enter that number here _____. This is your dose to be used twice a day.
Notes:
*Be sure your pH and alk are within normal reef limits before starting. Adjust if needed. Monitor weekly.
*Shoot for a ppm of around 5 or lower if only dosing for improved coral growth, coloration, and spread. Shoot for higher amounts up to 30 ppm if you are having melting zoas or closed zoas and look for the causes of your problems as you dose. Check for high nitrates, pests, zoa pox, predators, and unstable water conditions.
*Dose low amounts and increase the amount slowly over the course of a few days to a couple weeks.
* If you notice an algae bloom (white stringy stuff) or increased scum on your glass then cut back by half until it disappears.
* Watch your skimmer, it will start to skim more.
* Dose the amount twice a day in a fast moving area of your sump or overflow. You may dilute the vitamin c in ro/di water then pour into overflow. If adding to sump, try and add the vitamin c after filtration such as skimmers and reactors.
* If you have a question, ask here. Puffy checks this thread daily.
* The instructions in this guide and throughout this thread are based on using pure Sodium Ascorbate, not vitamin c pills and other non-buffered forms of vitamin c.
Be sure to take some "before" pics!
ludnix
New member
My friend and I put this calculator together based on the information in this thread. I hope to make a full article explaining the vitamin C dosing method on this page, but I'll need some help from Jeff and Pufferpink and our other Vitamin C gurus to get it all correct as I've only just started dosing myself.
Anyway here's the calculator, if you see anything wrong with it let me know, the last thing I want is people to be dosing incorrectly.
http://www.reefsome.com/articles/Vitamin-C-Dosing
Anyway here's the calculator, if you see anything wrong with it let me know, the last thing I want is people to be dosing incorrectly.
http://www.reefsome.com/articles/Vitamin-C-Dosing
Pufferpunk
New member
Very cool!
ludnix
New member
What is everyone using for dosage measurements? I was thinking of picking up a mg scale to use, but I was curious if everyone ends up switching to a more practical teaspoon measurement or what?
I'm thinking I'll just portion out my dosages for a monthly basis so I don't have to weigh the dosage twice a day, but I'm interested to see what everyone else is doing.
I'm thinking I'll just portion out my dosages for a monthly basis so I don't have to weigh the dosage twice a day, but I'm interested to see what everyone else is doing.
Jeff
Premium Member
I always just used a teaspoon from the kitchen. I think Puffy uses a measuring spoon (at least she did the 20 times I tank sat for her :lol: ). It doesnt have to be that exact unless you have a 3 gallon pico tank. If you portion it out ahead of time keep in mind that it starts to break down quickly when exposed to air, water, or light.
Pufferpunk
New member
I round it to the nearest 1/4 tsp. I can always heap it a little or shake some off. My 100g system gets 1 tsp, 15g 1/4 tsp & 40g 1/2 tsp. It seems to work for me.
ludnix
New member
I'm looking at a 10th of a teaspoon to get my 1ppm :lol:
You said you are dosing only at night now. Are you doing twice what the calculator would say all at night? Would you reccomend starting out with dosing at night or do you think the twice daily is still a better option when starting out?
I think I'd definitely prefer to dose only at nights, but if there's a benefit to dosing in the morning too I could do that as well.
You said you are dosing only at night now. Are you doing twice what the calculator would say all at night? Would you reccomend starting out with dosing at night or do you think the twice daily is still a better option when starting out?
I think I'd definitely prefer to dose only at nights, but if there's a benefit to dosing in the morning too I could do that as well.
Pufferpunk
New member
VC is totally dissipated in the water & used up in the cells of animals after 8 hours. Best results actually are accomplished by dosing every 8 hours. For issues with sick corals/fish, I would highly suggest doing that but for your experiment, I would do it 2x/day. I am dosing for maintance only right now.
ludnix
New member
I'm planning to start my dosing tomorrow. I thought I better post my before pictures for documentation. In this picture I had some zoos disappearing for no apparent reason, recently they started to fill back in though. I have no idea why they were diminishing, but they came back even faster than they had went away.
One of the hard things about knowing if this method is effective in healing zoos comes from this that we can't easily setup a controlled environment to test it. Hopefully we'll be able to compare the color of my corals and growth rate though, that has been pretty steady for the past year.
This SPS coral has some green in the base on the other side, I think this is from excess phosphates so that's something I'll try to get a better picture of and document as I dose.
You can see some cyano on my sand bed. I'm not using vitamin C as a method to get rid of cyano, I can easily get rid of it by reducing my feeds, but I think it will be interesting to see how vitamin C affects it over time.
One of the hard things about knowing if this method is effective in healing zoos comes from this that we can't easily setup a controlled environment to test it. Hopefully we'll be able to compare the color of my corals and growth rate though, that has been pretty steady for the past year.
This SPS coral has some green in the base on the other side, I think this is from excess phosphates so that's something I'll try to get a better picture of and document as I dose.
You can see some cyano on my sand bed. I'm not using vitamin C as a method to get rid of cyano, I can easily get rid of it by reducing my feeds, but I think it will be interesting to see how vitamin C affects it over time.
Jeff
Premium Member
Eric, your reef looks great. If you have normal results with the vitamin c, you will most likely see a slight increase in the cyano for a short amount of time and then it will dissapear. You will most likely see increased growth and spread of corals as well. Since you have a lot of different types of softies, I bet you see a couple of your corals morph into different shades. I had it happen to me and I think it is because of increased light penetration effecting the corals. After all of this happened to my reef, I cut back to around 2 ppm as kind of a maintenance dose. That amount seemed to keep things in good shape. Good luck 
.
.
Pufferpunk
New member
It works as a carbon source. Might find more info in the Reef Chemistry forum. There's a lot of discussion on VC there too.
Why and how are incredibly complex when you start to look into mini-ecosystems such as our tanks. The current thought is bacteria proliferation makes up the bulk of nitrate and phosphate exportation. Interestingly though is denitrification. The possibility exists that this is another pathway that is being utilized to a good degree with some carbon sources. Then
there are smaller probable pathways that get brought up but may not play a significant roll in N/P reduction.
KillerReef
Wrasse-a-holic
not sure if this was asked before, but how do we know if our VC is buffered? I have 2 kinds of vitamin C. Only ingredients are Vitamin C and Calcium, both as "Calcium Ascorbate"
The other has ingredients listed as Vitamin C(as ascorbic Acid). Thanks, Dave
The other has ingredients listed as Vitamin C(as ascorbic Acid). Thanks, Dave
