Anyone locally dosing Vodka (for the tank, not you!)

Awesome glad you got the slime under control. Do you think the bleaching is due to extremely low po4? I had a couple chalices bleach when I added them to the tank when I was on vite c. They came back a few weeks later so hold onto your acro it should recover. Thanks for the update.
-Bill

 

I have been dosing vodka since Jan. I also have a 72 gallon bowfront there's pics in photo section under FD Reefers tank. I started doseing after dealing with hair algae.Well long story short hair algae is gone and tank has never looked better in the 4 yrs that it's been up. I now dose 1ml morning and at night.The only down side that I have noticed is that when I was dosing 2ml morning and night my digi's got very white ends on them , but this did not keep them from growing at all just looked funny, so I cut back to 1 ml morning and afternoon. So u may want to drop your ml a little. I'm no expert on the subject but IMO dosing vodka has made my tank so much easier to keep and has really made my corals color up.

 

I may be wrong, but the white tips on the ends of the digi's is a good thing. This means that they are growing fast. Mine all are white/tan on the tips and they are super fast growers, so the white on the tips isn't necessarily a bad thing. I'm planning on starting to dose vodka as soon as I can get my skimmer going good.

 

Posted By adampottebaum on 06/30/2010 09:43 PM
I may be wrong, but the white tips on the ends of the digi's is a good thing. This means that they are growing fast. Mine all are white/tan on the tips and they are super fast growers, so the white on the tips isn't necessarily a bad thing. I'm planning on starting to dose vodka as soon as I can get my skimmer going good.
+1 mine have whitish tan tips to and grow crazy fast.

 

my bad. I thought it was the vodka turning tips white, but I guess it's normal for this to happen.You learn something new everyday.

 

Can someone post again what kind of vodka they are dosing and how many ml per gallon?

-Justin

 

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

 

Just get distilled vodka, but there's no set limit to know how much to dose. You need to start very low and work your way up to a daily dose limit, testing all the way... Read the article I just posted and you'll understand more.

 

thanks for the information. I have a skimmer, but since it is a biocube, it is only a aqualife 115...so not anythign substantial like an big skimmer.

I will have to look into this.

-Justin

 

Hay Eric,
yea i'm running the ecobac bio pellets now. They have been running for about 6 weeks or so now. My po4 test 0 on a api kit so dose my no3 but it always did. But I was deff getting better color with the vite c. I was also able to feed like crazy with the vite c not so much with the pellets. If I try to feed heavy with the pellets I get a green bloom on the glass. So far I'm starting to think that vite c is better than the pellets. But i'll give them a few more weeks and see what happens.

 

So, I may have came up with a pretty good idea on how to make dosing a lot easier/consistent. Has anyone ever tried getting the bottle tops that bartenders use to add 1 oz. of vodka per pour? This could easily be incorporated into a dosing regimen. Once you slowly work up to your tank's daily dosing level, you could take an extra vodka bottle, buy the 1 oz. topper(double check it for accuracy of course), then dilute the vodka in the bottle with RO/DI water so that the 1 oz. pour contains your daily dosing amount.

I'm a genius, I know. I'm sure it's been done before, but I'm about ready to start dosing(slowly) vodka and have been doing a lot of drinking on the topic, I mean thinking, so I looked up this thread to revive it, plus I wanted to see everyone's progress/results!

It almost sounds too easy. What does everyone think about this? I could easily have a diluted vodka bottle by my tank that I gave a quick poor once a day. I remember F.D. Reefer talking on his "Smirnoff Adventure" thread about dosing when you feed, so this could be something we learned to do every day until it becomes "hardwired" to give our fish a shot every day!

Ideas...

 

I'm also thinking this could be done with dosing two part solutions!

 

For those of you currently dosing have you considered switching to bio-pellets? The reason I ask is because when I started looking at dosing a carbon source I did some research about the bio-pellets and it seems like they are less hassle and there is less chance of a bacterial bloom in your tank. Plus it was my understanding that when you dose carbon you can get a build up of some slimy bacteria in the tank and plumbing?

 

Iv never personally had the "bacteria bloom" and have been dosing for 10 months.The whiteish slime I do get in pumps and in skimmer, but not in the tank, it dosent seem to affect performance and if you keep up monthly maintenence on pumps and stuff it's no big deal. IMO it's just showing me that the bacteria are "doing work". As far as pellets go IMO "if it ain't broke don't mess with it" is how I look at .Maybe in the future I would consider it. My tank runs hot enough without adding another reactor and pump. JMO. As far as dosing goes it is a routine for me now "I just give the fish some "food & a stiff drink"instead of just "food".