Vodka help

Cyno is gone. I switched to 100% vinegar. Nitrates are at 5 phosphates say 0 but I think some is being used by a little patch or hair algae I keep pruning.
 
Day 6...

last night i noticed my skimmer cup was a little more disgusting than usual. it's normally a light yellow color and smells like sewage. its more of a dark yellow/brown color now but it smells almost like a cleaning product. not as sweet as windex, almost like a windex/bleach mixture. anyone else smell their skim?
 
FWIW, in the last 15 years or so, my skimmate has never smelled bad. I'm not sure why, but perhaps folks with a lot of sliming SPS produce organics that smell much worse than what I skim out. :)
 
Mine stinks but not like a cleaning solution more like sewer gas but not quite like hydrogene sufide. I have lot's of sliming sps, so maybe Randy's idea is why. It's dark brown near black sometimes with clumps in it which I guess are bacterial mass and fills the large cup every few days.
 
Yeah sewer gas, that's what it used to smell like. My last cup was basicly scent less. 1.6ml today and still at 5 no3. Granted I missed my usual tuesday water change.
 
New curiosity going on. My alk is rising. I've read vinigar is used to increase the saturation of kalkwasser in ro/di so I assume this is normal? I stopped adding kalkwasser, my alk is at 9. Am I okay there?
 
Okay maybe I have more evaporation happening. It's been warm out. Sorry I'm just really cautious on this whole dosing thing.
 
How's the dosing coming along? Did you get your NO3 down? Using your tank and others as examples of why I should start dosing. Cheers.
 
I got about 2 weeks in and even after switching to vinigar I had a huge cyano outbreak. Then as my phos and no3 hit 0 and I backed off a little bit to find my maintenance dose. Then my Sps started to not do so well
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I'm almost off the dosing and my corals seems to be doing better. I'm not sure what went wrong, maybe my water got to clean to fast? On a positive note I did a 2 day blackout and my cyano is gone. Maybe Randy has some insight on where I went wrong.
 
I had no cyano, then after 3 days of vodka dosing .05ml I had an outbreak. I switched to vinegar abd for the next 2 days dosed .8ml. Cyano seemed to go away. For the next 7 days I dosed 1.6ml and all my readings hit 0 so I backed down to 1ml for 2 days then .8 for the next 5 everything still reading 0.

I figured that was my maintenance dose. So I kept at it .8 and one day I noticed my birdsnest was starting to turn more white than normal. Then I noticed that pink coral in the pic start to turn white on the top. I lowered my dose to .5ml and boom cyano everywhere. Then I kinda lost track because I stopped writing down how much I dosed but I kept at .5ml for a few days and slowly tapered off to .1 today and 0 tomorrow. I think I overdosed and that's why I had issues. Maybe I'm not quite ready for carbon dosing yet. I've seen a lot of really nice tanks with vodka dosing but now it's damage control.

I hope that all made sense, I feel like I may have rambled there for a minute.
 
I'm not sure what happened. That's often the story with carbon dosing. Does the tank still have a cyanobacterial bloom?
 
Those are very low doses even for a 29 g tank . I don't know what is happening
 
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I went by this chart I figure actual water volume is between 22 and 25g.

I started with 1/2 dose just to be safe. Cyano went away after a 2 day blackout. I left the refugium light on to try and keep ph and oxygen up.

Im not sure what happened either, but that was the only change I made so we'll see.

I haven't fully ruled out a pest of some sort but I haven't seen any.
 
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