Although these questions have been answered quite a few times, here is the cliff note version:
Vinegar dosing in large quantities can cause an immediate drop in PH. You will want to spread ou your vinegar dosing a bit, unless you only need a small ammount of dosing in the first place to keep your tank in check.
If you use kalkwasser, vinegar is a great addition. They play very well with each other (vinegar helps with kalk saturation and protects from large PH spikes. Kalk keeps vinegar from dropping PH too much).
You will find that some people, including myself, prefer vinegar over vodka. As vodka seems to "cause" more frequent outbreaks of cyano. Vinegar dosing doesnt seem to have this same end affect.
Personally, I would not turn off my skimmer while carbon dosing. By nature, carbon dosing starves your tank of oxygen. Skimmers help alleviate this issue. IMO, there will be plenty of carbon to go around. I dont feel that the brief period of time that a skimmer being turned off is going to do enough to be considered beneficial.
No matter what form of carbon dosing you choose, the better option will always be to dose over longer periods of time instead of one large dose. But, if you want to keep it nice and simple, one large dose will work just fine as well.
ok I seem to get the point now, I was getting confused with how to dose I was reading more on drip then just dump. Then I seem a pic of someone with what looked like an IV drip setup. But I can live with the dumbing part.
So I guess it's recommended to turn off skimmer when doing this? Should this be done daily until I start to get undue table nitrates then level off, or weekly? If I read it correctly its daily I think
Also I thought about just using vinegar dosing instead of vodka, is there any difference in the methods except the dosage is higher for vinager then vodka?
Sorry about all the questions I just don't feel comfortable starting something new when I have so much tired into my tank.
