So I have had a few people on NAR that have been asking me about vinegar dosing, i.e. carbon dosing on how to start. A little background, my current tank has been up for two years but I have a lot of older rock that has been with me about ten (10) years. I started to get Cyno on my sand bed a few months ago, and it even started to show on to the rocks. A lot of the sand in my current tank was also moved over from the old tank and probably had a lot of detritus and trapped organics. My test kits at that time had my nitrates at zero and my phosphates at about .15 but it really wasn’t telling the whole story. I believe my rocks/sand bed were at a saturation point and the cyno/algae was showing up because of this. I was also running a GFO reactor but it was just masking the problem at the time. I did a bunch of water changes and vacuumed the sand bed but the problem persisted.

So I went to Reef Central (my other favorite site) and started searching the Cyno threads and how to fix my issue. I noticed again & again that many had solved their problems with carbon dosing. I was a little skeptical since I have quite a bit of $$$ tied up in corals & fish and to start dumping vodka, sugar, or vinegar in my box of water seemed a little crazy. But I kept reading and came upon this article:

www.reefkeeping.com/issues/2008-08/nftt/index.php

This article was the one that convinced me to give it a go since I was fed up with my algae issues. Then the question was vodka or vinegar? I had used vinegar in the past added to kalkwasser to saturate it and add as top off water to my old reef tank with great results. Also vinegar seemed to have less issues than some of the articles I had read using Vodka dosing. One important note if you use Vinegar you need to use 8 times the vodka dosing amount.

So enough rambling how to you get started? First & foremost go slow and follow the dosing regime listed in the attached article. I have about 200 gallons of total volume of water so I divided 200 /25 = 8 x .8ml = 6.4 mL for my starting dose. You then dose your starting dose for three days and increase your dosage amount for days 4-7, and then after this first week you will increase your dosage at the same level each week. While you are doing this make sure you test your phosphates & Alk every couple of days just to make sure your levels are not rising or decreasing rapidly. Once your phosphates have come down to zero (it took me 6 weeks) you will cut your dosage in half, which will be your maintenance dose. Adjust up or down as necessary to keep your phosphates hovering around zero.

One thing you will notice after a couple of days of dosing is that your water will be crystal clear. Also you may get a little yellowing of water over time due to increased bacteria with carbon dosing so it is a good idea to run carbon 24/7 in a reactor to counter this. My results to date have been outstanding my corals, (especially SPS) have seemed to come out of almost a dormant state of growth to now being able to see exceptional growth every week. The colors on my SPS & Acans have also become more vibrant continue to improve. I also took my GFO Reactor offline after a couple of weeks of dosing Vinegar and will probably only be used in emergency situations from here out. Good Luck and take it SLOOOOOW!

All great advice Scott. Thanks for sharing.

Great post thank you. I am roaring an ready to jump I to this but have the same initial concern, I am adding what to my tank?!?!?!

I am in the midst of upgrading my skimmer, partially because I want to begin carbon dosing.

Might be a stupid question, but aren't there different kinds of basic vinegar? Is it just White distiller vinegar? I know not to use ones with additives like the apple cider vinegar we have right now.

flyguy1821 wrote:
Yes there are. Use one this white vinegar. Don't use any on the other types.

Flyguy, I forgot to post what type of vinegar as Dean stated you want to use white distilled vinegar. Also another thing I forgot to touch on that is extremely important you must have a STRONG skimmer for carbon dosing for two reasons. First you're skimmer production will probably increase drastically, and second dosing a carbon source will decrease your Oxygen levels quite a bit. So make sure you're running your skimmer 24/7 and wide open.