I would start with a quarter of the recommended dose, and go up by 15% of the total dose every 4 days until you get to the recommended dose. So if your recommended dose for your tank size is 10ml a day, start with 2.5ml, then 4ml, 5.5, 7, 8.5, 10. IMO you want to start slow to avoid a bacteria bloom. Make sure you’re running your skimmer. Make sure you’re monitoring your nutrient levels, and once you notice that they’re really starting to go down, stop increasing the dose and stay at that dose until you get to where you want your levels to be. Once you get to where you want your levels, slowly start lowering the dose until nutrients start to go back up and stop there (or whatever the dose was before your most recent reduction) and then that’s your maintenance dose. Once you get to a maintenance dose, you may need to adjust if you add more livestock, livestock gets bigger, you start feeding more, your refugium starts being more productive, etc. The idea is to get it kick started and then work down to the lowest possible dose to maintain the levels you want. Again, skimming is really important, both for gas exchange (the bacteria it grows uses O2), and to remove bacteria from the water column. I would recommend to skim on the wet side, not skimming can lead to the growth of gross whitish/pink bacteria that has the consistency of wet cobwebs (if that makes sense). It can take several weeks to really get going, but once it does, it works really well.
